Google Spanner – A better Google

A recent presentation confirmed the existence of the proprietary distributed technology that will automatically move and replicate the load between Google’s mega data centers when traffic and hardware issues arise. Perhaps this was done to counter the issues of lagtime when Gmail was down..who knows? The platform is known as Spanner.

Google fellow Jeff Dean hinted about Spanner in the classic Google manner during a conference this summer and has now confirmed its existence in a presentation (PDF) delivered at a symposium earlier this month. .Dean’s presentation calls it a “storage and computation system that spans all our data centers [and that] automatically moves and adds replicas of data and computation based on constraints and usage patterns.” This includes issues and constraints related to bandwidth, packet loss, power, resources, and “failure modes”.

Google is intent on scaling Spanner to between one million and 10 million servers, encompassing 10 trillion (1013) directories and a quintillion (1018) bytes of storage. And all this would be spread across “100s to 1000s” of locations around the world.

Thats a hell lot of data and power granted to a single corporation which will be housing an exabyte of the world's data across thousands of custom-built data centers.

Lets see how this unfolds..