3 ms·
Google are the sort of company who would rather have 5,000 crappy, unreliable, but efficient and tiny inverters attached internally to crappy, unreliable commod
by _wmd 12y ago
Google are the sort of company who would rather have 5,000 crappy, unreliable, but efficient and tiny inverters attached internally to crappy, unreliable commodity servers than spend 5000x on a single, huge, expensive, only slightly more reliable inverter covering all 5,000 servers.
It's just another way of pushing unreliability to the network edge where it minimizes systemic effects and can be replicated away cheaply, much like they did with GFS or even their UPS system (at least previous server generations at Google included a large per-server battery).
- scott_karana 12y agoNothing about your comment is mutual exclusive with the one you're replying to... One inverter per solar panel sounds just like one inverter per server.
- _wmd 12y agoParent comment assumes one inverter per solar panel, my comment suggests it's more like one per 19" rack unit. Today's inverter vs. the kind of size they're looking for is a difference of perhaps 4-10TB per U, or approaching enough space for an extra half petabyte of spinning rust per rack
- scott_karana 12y agoAh, thanks for clarifying. My bad. :)