Wednesday, October 13, 2010

How many servers do google have ??

Many people (including me) ask how many servers do google really have ???
According to me the number is more than 1 Million.
Here's how i calculated it, estimates are pretty old in some cases.

  • Size of google index  > 100 Million GB
  • Number of users on gmail >  176 Million http://www.youtube.com/t/fact_sheet
    Considering just 0.5 Gb per account on an average (Not all of 7.xxGB is used, hence its most likely to be shared among users)
    The size is > 88 Million GB (This is much less than actual, but for the time being let it be)
  • Size of youtube > 50 Million GB (>54 million registered users, which exclude the GB's of videos from educational institutions) (also see http://www.youtube.com/t/fact_sheet)
Without including Google earth (it ought be few million GB's) , picasa, and many other google products, we are aready at 200 Million GB mark .

Including all those will make us cross 300-400 million mark. And these figures are pretty old. So therefore considering a 250Gb harddisk(with around 200 Gb useable) with each server (see bigtable paper in google research labs) i feel that google has more than 1 Million servers :)