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What does whitebox mean in this context?

• bestham 5y ago
  A “white box” server not built by a typical server manufacturer. It could be a no-name part or a consumer PC acting as a server. Google were known for not buying traditional servers from Company, Dell and the like.
  • dekhn 5y ago
    google bought servers from dell, and from rackspace or some other vendor. I helped run a fleet of dells with 15K SCSI drives for google (mysql workload) that was absolutely critical and it took the company a decade to replace the dell machines with "white box" (really, self-designed and externally manufactured) servers.
    • Fnoord 5y ago
      What Google did different than the rest back in the days was mostly relying on x86-32 with Linux and not so much RISC (SPARC) with Solaris. Sun's market share was huge back in those days.