Servers

A story from Wired today interviewed Chris Sharp, the GM of content and cloud at data center Equinix where Google happens to lease space alongside some of its biggest competitors. Sharp told an interesting story about Google removing all the light bulbs above its server cages a couple years back. The company then required those working on the servers to wear helmets with lights:

About two years ago, Chris Sharp says, Google unscrewed all the light bulbs inside the hardware cages it occupied at that Equinix data center. “They had us turn off all overhead lights too, and their guys put on those helmets with lights you see miners wear,” he tells Wired. “Presumably, they were bringing up custom-built gear they didn’t want anyone else to see.”

The reason Google did this, according to Sharp, is “there’s a lot of valuable intellectual property.” He added that many companies try to conceal equipment, but he was “always amazed by Google and the helmets.” As Wired pointed out, Google builds its own servers and associated gear and most likely does not want competitors leasing space at Equinix to get a look.

Expand
Expanding
Close

As the CyanogenMod team works to continue releasing new “nightly builds” of its custom Android firmware, it just released a blog post this morning asking for donations from the community. The team said it needed donations to purchase new servers to keep releasing new builds.

CyanogenMod is not a for-profit business. We are just a bunch of geeks, trying to make our phones more awesome. The donations we get currently cover our operating costs and occasionally go towards developer devices. This time, I need to ask for help from the community for something a bit larger. We need to purchase these servers in order to bring the build infrastructure back to full capacity.

The CyanogenMod community quickly jumped into action, and the CyanogenMod team earned the money it needed (and perhaps a bit more) in only a few short hours to purchase the necessary servers. The team will buy “Xeon-class boxes with lots of RAM” next week. Check out the full statement below:

Expand
Expanding
Close