Google Mourns Veteran Engineer Luiz André Barroso Who Invented the Modern Data Center
Google’s first data center consisted of 40-foot, server-filled shipping containers, which enabled advanced cooling and fewer construction headaches. It opened its own data center campus in Oregon in 2006, resembling the conventional bland, boxy, and massive buildings that now dot the world. But Barroso’s ideas made the insides exceptional.He and his Google colleagues turned away from the then standard approach of centralizing key software in a data center on a few expensive and powerful machines. Instead they began distributing Google’s programs across thousands of cheaper, mid-grade servers. That saved money spent on pricey hardware while also saving energy and allowing software to run more nimbly.Barroso laid out his new philosophy in The Datacenter as a Computer, a book he coauthored w...
