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In 2010, there were just over 1 million secure Internet websites worldwide. Almost half of those, or 446,992 to be exact, were located in the United States.
But in which country can we find the most secure websites in relation to population? The answer may surprise you.
Last year, Google bought an old paper mill in Finland. Now the company is in process of converting that paper mill into a major data center. Construction is already well underway, and the data center is expected to go live next spring. It will be Google’s first dedicated data center in the Nordic countries, with several interesting innovations, for example being cooled entirely by sea water.
Swedish magazine Computer Sweden was recently on location in Finland and has published an article (in Swedish) with new information and pictures from the build. We’ve summarized the important parts of that article and also what other information we could find around the Web, mostly from Finnish newspaper articles.
Did you ever wonder how busy the servers of the world’s largest social networks are? It turns out it’s very hard work being popular, especially for the number one player.
According to data from Google, Facebook serves 260 billion page views per month. That’s more than six million page views per minute, or a staggering 37.4 trillion page views in a year. We can safely assume that Facebook’s web servers aren’t getting bored waiting around for work to do.
How many servers does Google have? Nobody outside Google knows exactly how many servers the company has, but there have been a number of estimates through the years. One of the most quoted ones is from 2006, when it was estimated that Google had approximately 450,000 servers. And that was three years ago.
Another estimate showed up in 2007, this time from the analyst firm Gartner, estimating the number of Google servers to one million.
Considering that both these estimates are from a long time ago and Google has grown its data centers significantly since then, it’s not unreasonable to assume that Google today has at least one million servers worldwide.
Are you a programmer? Want to do something for the environment and even make the world a better place? Then start optimizing your code!
It seems like today the solution to most software performance issues is to throw more hardware at the problem instead of making the software run faster on existing hardware. Doing more with less is a forgotten mantra, and Wirth’s Law continues to ring true:
Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.
The Wolfram Alpha team has revealed some information about its hardware setup on their team blog. If you haven’t heard about Wolfram Alpha, it’s a soon-to-be launched “computational knowledge engine” with an interface similar to a search engine. There’s been a lot of buzz about it, for example on ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch.
Since it launched in 1998, Google has become one of the true giants of the Internet. These days, Google has data centers all around the world and hundreds of thousands of servers. The sheer size of Google today makes it very interesting to look back at its humble beginnings as a small research project called Backrub at Stanford University.
When it comes to the ability to do damage to a company, few employees have more power than sysadmins. Deep system access and inside knowledge is a necessary part of their job, but when things go bad between employee and employer, some very sensitive situations can arise.
Here are six real-world cases of “sysadmins gone wild” that all ended up in court.
The people behind the Wordpress.com blogging service recently shared some technical information about their new data center in Chicago, which is located in a Layered Technologies facility.
In November, Google wrote in their official blog that they had done an experiment where they had sorted 1 PB (1,000 TB) of data with MapReduce. The information about the sorting itself was impressive, but one thing that stuck in our minds was the following (emphasis added by us):
An interesting question came up while running experiments at such a scale: Where do you put 1PB of sorted data? We were writing it to 48,000 hard drives (we did not use the full capacity of these disks, though), and every time we ran our sort, at least one of our disks managed to break (this is not surprising at all given the duration of the test, the number of disks involved, and the expected lifetime of hard disks).
Each of these sorting runs that Google did lasted six hours. So that would mean that hard drives would be breaking at least 4 times a day for every 48,000 hard drives that a data center is using.
