Brownout Squared

by StockJockey

Thursday, February 01, 2007 - 9:58 pm

Google’s stock was not the only thing browning out today. The voracious demand for information is taxing the grid…

by Laurie Sullivan
February 1, 2007
Google News, the popular news aggregation site, made some headlines of its own on Thursday when server problems caused content posted to the site to disappear from view.

The problems began about 7 a.m. Pacific time. Users trying to access the Google News site instead received an error message saying, “Google Error. Server Error. The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds.”

A number of users have had difficulty accessing Google News on Thursday, Google spokeswoman Sonya Boralv said in an email. “We know how important Google News is to our users and are working as quickly as possible to resolve the problem,” she said. “The service should be restored within the hour.”

Sources say a traffic spike overloaded the site’s capacity. Although the official source of the downage isn’t known, server power consumption and server capacity have become major concerns for Google as more people go online seeking news and information.

Search engines are struggling to increase performance on power-hungry servers amid rising electricity and cooling costs.

Got Capex?

Google is spending boatloads on infrastructure…

Last year, Google began building and deploying a 30-acre server farm in The Dalles, Oregon, on the banks of the Columbia River Gorge. The company paid about $1.87 million for 30.19 acres of land.

Google also plans to invest about $600 million to build a data center in North Carolina to meet the online services giant’s expanding computing needs. Read more at Red Herring

Kill a tree, read a paper?

Nah…
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