xagm ouch, page-24

diversification is my guess I think they will use the money to diversify, sell other product offerings into their wonderful large customer base; similar to what google may be planning:

read this interesting article:

Innovation News
Is Google building a whole new Internet?
Thu, Mar 2 2006

By Jonathan Oxer, IVT Technical Director

Google is one of those success stories whose incredible rise has been hard to comprehend. In just a couple of years it's gone from being an idea in the minds of a couple of college students to one of the biggest companies in the world. But now they face a problem. They have enormous market capitalisation and have essentially taken control of the online advertising market not to mention being the dominant search player, but to keep the buzz going they need to keep growing.

Another issue they are facing now is backlash from other players in the industry such as the large data carriers who have spent years building the high performance IP networks that form the current Internet backbone. These carriers have been at the top of the food chain for years but now they are being seen as just commodity providers who run the pipes that connect users at one end to content providers at the other. Now that they see Google making enormous profits using their infrastructure they want to get in on the action and there have been some angry outbursts recently from very senior people within large carriers claiming that Google is getting a free ride on the networks that the carriers have built. The carriers now want to use their dominant position to get a bigger slice of the pie, saying that companies like Google and Yahoo! should be paying more to use their services.

The folks at Google are obviously very smart and they know that without the cooperation of major carriers they can't reach end users, but they've been doing some very interesting things recently that could potentially change the whole way the Internet works and give them direct access to end users.

Something that's not commonly known at the moment is that with their new-found billions Google have been going around buying up unused long-haul networks: what the industry calls "dark fibre", optical fibre that has been laid but hasn't been turned on ("lit up"). They now own one of the biggest networks in the world and most of it is still unlit, it's sitting there waiting for the day that it needs to be activated. That alone should give major telcos the screaming heebie-jeebies at night.

Added to that they have been rapidly expanding their data centres. Google have a *lot* of servers. The last figure I heard was somewhere in the region of 200,000 servers spread across data centers all over the world. Each data center is big: we're talking about facilities the size of supermarkets, but instead of rows of shelves they have racks and racks of servers. Google has quite a few of these data centers, but for what they have planned they don't have enough of them.

Another side-effect of the dot-com crash a couple of years ago is that many companies that had built their own data centers now have them sitting empty. For a while now Google has been going around buying every unused data center they can get their hands on, and now they own about 600 of them. The reason they've done that is they realise they need to push their infrastructure right out to the edge of the Internet, close to where end users are. If everything stays centralised they remain at the mercy of the data carriers and performance for end users suffers as well.

So at this point they own about 600 data centers and an unlit global network all ready to tie them together, but even that's not enough. Something they have been experimenting with recently is building complete, self-contained data centers in 40 foot shipping containers that each contain about 5,000 servers plus all the supporting equipment needed to run them. They can then just deliver a shipping container to a peering point at an ISP, plug in a couple of megawatts of power and an internet connection, and all of a sudden they can have an instant data center on-site. The rumour is that they intend to build about 3,000 of these data-centers-in-a-box and ship them all over the world, giving them large quantities of computing power and storage right at the edge of the Internet where users can access it most rapidly.

Over the last year or two an amazing number of my friends have gone to work for Google. At linux.conf.au in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago I was chatting to a friend of mine who recently went to work for Google in Dublin, and he was happily telling me stories like how they can use their query load balancer to increase the temperature of the buildings housing data centers by several degrees simply by directing more queries to those particular servers, and how Google is bringing in such vast quantities of hardware from Asia that they bought an entire port so they could process shiploads of servers more quickly. But when I started asking him about the progress of the data-center-in-a-box project he shuffled his feet, looked away and mumbled "I'm sorry, I can't talk about that". That to me is perfect confirmation that Google are taking the project very seriously!

Just to make things even more interesting, Google has recently deployed a city-wide wireless ISP in San Francisco, installing wireless access points to give people direct access to the Internet.

Now if you put all this together, think about the position it puts Google in. They have the biggest distributed data center in the world, all ready to deliver vast quantities of content to users. They have the biggest IP network in the world, all ready to connect those data centers together. And they have the capability of building wireless ISPs at very low cost to provide direct access to their network.

Those three things give them total control from beginning to end of a complete alternative Internet. So what are they going to do with it? Well, I think I have a pretty good idea, but only time will tell if I'm right. Watch this space, folks.