Google's storage capacity and sheer processing power

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==Description==

Google has an estimated 150 000 servers, which enables the company to do anything it wants. Having so many servers with each day increasing numbers gives Google the flexibility to launch new products that requires huge amount of storage capacity and sheer processing power such as Google Base and Google Earth.

==Enablers==

• Increasing number of servers each day

• Financial strength

• Different vendors for the supply of servers

• Inexpensive hardware

==Inhibitors==

• Increasingly huge consumption of storage by different products

• Increasing huge investment needs (land, infrastructure, IT, people)

• Increasing complexity

==Paradigms==

Until last year people could have a free web based e-mail accounts with no more than 5 MB storage capacity, which wasn’t bringing any flexibility to the user because of this limited capacity. It was a revolution on the internet when Google started distributing free web based e-mail accounts with a storage capacity more than 2 GB. This allowed many people using Gmail to have a great flexibility anywhere they were traveling since they could keep almost all of their e-mails and data on their accounts and access it anywhere in the world through the internet. This is definitely changed the life of the people that were dependent on a free web based e-mails.

==Experts==

W. M. Coughran, Jr. (Google Inc. Vice President Engineering)

Alan Eustace, (Google Inc. Senior Vice President Engineering&Research)

==Timing==

Started with the purchase of a terabyte in 1998, Google continued to invest in buying servers, hardware and building required infrastructures. In the next 15 years, Google will need more to buy and build because of the growing storage consumption by increasing number of users of the different Google products.

==Web Resources==

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,112891,00.asp

http://www.byteandswitch.com/document.asp?doc_id=85804&WT.svl=news1_2

http://money.cnn.com/2006/01/24/technology/dumbest_googleintro/index.htm

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