Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Server that Changed the World(Google’s Very First Server)


The Sun Ultra 2 may seem like an unlikely candidate to make this list, but it steps up as the server which first hosted Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s Backrub search engine – which, of course, eventually evolved into Google.
In 1998, Backrub was hosted on a Sun Ultra 2 with dual 200Mhz CPUs and 256MB of RAM at Stanford University. The famous image of the computer case partially made up of legos (pictured) isn’t actually the Backrub server, but rather its enclosure for external storage. (There were also a couple of Intel Servers and an IBM RS/6000 F50 in their network.)
This is quite a humble beginning, considering there are now over 450,000 servers in Google’s datacenters around the world. The simplicity of its search engine and its relative results blew away their competitors. (And it all started on an Ultra 2.)

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