Google has admitted that its data centers are pieced together using intermodal shipping containers pre-packed with servers and cooling equipment.
As reported by our friends at
Data Center Knowledge, the search giant dropped its long-standing data-center wall of secrecy this morning during a company event in Mountain View. Confirming an
October report from
The Register, Google said it has used containers in its live data centers since 2005.
Famously, Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive
publicly pitched the container idea in the fall of 2003, and that December, Google filed for a patent describing a modular data center of its own. According to Kahle and a well-known 2005 expose from Robert X. Cringely, Google co-founder Larry Page was in the audience for one Internet Archive pitch a little more than a month before the patent filing.