Comment Not $500,000 (Score 3, Interesting) 534
Actually this article came in on my rss reader yesterday, I did some quick back on the envelope counting, and I'm not sure you can get a container for $500.000. I read before that Google used to have racks with wheels under them, completely full with 1U servers and fully cabled. They only had to plug in power and network and they were all set. When the datacenter went bankrupt, they just wheeled the racks off to another location. So assuming that they are only using the containers for shipping:
One 20Ft container is:
* Length (20Ft)
* Width (8Ft)
* Height (8.5Ft)
That means you can get about 12 * 19" racks in, using 4 rows, about 64U high. That means a total of 3072 servers, using dual socket, dual core opterons, that's 12288 cores. Each server with 8 memory sockets + 4 disks, that's 24,576GB of RAM (1G sticks) and 6,144,000GB of Storage (500G disks). With some guestimate figures on current prices, I'd say one of those container would be worth about $12,500,000.
But then again, from a quick Google, they have about $3 billion in cash, and that's a lot of containers....
PS: I'm european using metrics mostly, so they're might be a small conversion problem here and there ;)
One 20Ft container is:
* Length (20Ft)
* Width (8Ft)
* Height (8.5Ft)
That means you can get about 12 * 19" racks in, using 4 rows, about 64U high. That means a total of 3072 servers, using dual socket, dual core opterons, that's 12288 cores. Each server with 8 memory sockets + 4 disks, that's 24,576GB of RAM (1G sticks) and 6,144,000GB of Storage (500G disks). With some guestimate figures on current prices, I'd say one of those container would be worth about $12,500,000.
But then again, from a quick Google, they have about $3 billion in cash, and that's a lot of containers....
PS: I'm european using metrics mostly, so they're might be a small conversion problem here and there
