Google Defies Dot-com Downturn

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April 27, 2001 (4:09 PM EDT)

It doesn't look like Google got the e-mail that the dot-com boom is over.

While other e-businesses are cutting back, Google is increasing its infrastructure as fast as it can, doubling the size of its server farm in the last 10 months, to 8,000 systems.

Google needs all that iron because demand for the site is booming. Google, which ranks in the top 25 Web pages worldwide, had 10.9 million unique visitors in March, compared with 3.2 million unique visitors in April 2000, according to Jupiter Media Metrix.

Despite the growing traffic, the site remains fast and accessible. Visitors to Google can access one of its pages in an average of.64-second, according to measuring firm Keynote Systems.

Google is one of the biggest enterprises using the increasingly popular server farm approach to scalability. As the prices and size of Intel-architecture servers shrink, enterprises scale by using large numbers of cheap, low-powered servers.

Google, like many other companies using this approach, runs Linux.

"You don't need one, enormous 64-way system, as long as you have truckloads of small systems," said Rich Partridge, an analyst with D.H. Brown Associates. "Google is taking a trend that others are doing and taking it out to an extreme."
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