Wired: How Google Spawned The 384-Chip Server

Gary Lauterbach says that Google racked its servers like hot bread at a bakery.

The year was 2001. Lauterbach was the chief microprocessor architect at Sun Microsystems, and two of his old Sun pals, Eric Schmidt and Wayne Rosing, had just joined Google. One afternoon, Lauterbach and another Sun bigwig, Jim Mitchell, walked to Google’s Palo Alto, California, office to see the server room. Even then, Google used a very different kind of server. According to Lauterbach, dirt-cheap motherboards were slotted into what looked like bread racks. These “bread rack servers” — as Lauterbach and others still call them — had no cases. They just sat on the racks, exposed to the open air.

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