Whoa, where is that? - Rob Hoeting

The original Google datacenter in '99 :) - Paul Buchheit

One of the consequences of factoring in component failure in your every move: you can save the cases, stuff's going to break anyway ;) - Mustafa K. Isik

This design turned out to be somewhat nightmarish. It was eventually cleaned up (we had a "cabling fest") and by now the designs are quite slick, though still very unconventional. I wish Google would publish more about their hardware, because it's very interesting. - Paul Buchheit

i have! it was even color coded, cables of different colors - Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)

WHEN CABLES GO BAD! I used to have a similar problem and the only way to trace cables was to put a small binder clip over the wire and push it along. - Stephen Pierzchala

Cables Gone Wild! woo hoo! gees that is bad. Paul YES I too wish Google published their IT Infrastructure / hardware info - Susan Beebe

pretty sure their current IT infrastructure involves genetically-modified human brains soaking in some kind of nutrient bath. - Karim

Personally seen much much worse. - CW™

BTW, I believe this is the same generation of hardware found in the Computer History Museum (they have the jj rack, as I recall). - Paul Buchheit

Paul: I've been inside a Google datacenter. They are a thing of beauty now. I've always wanted to interview the team that is responsible for doing those and get some video. - Robert Scoble

That's how it would look if it was set up at my house. - Gabe

I worked in a server room that look like that too - all those spagetti cabling craziness. - imabonehead

Robert - YES do video interview with Google DC Infrastructure brains! :) - Susan Beebe

How long would it take to fix if you pulled out just one cable?Or plugged it into the wrong socket? - Alistair

Neatly labeled I see ;) - Cam MacRae

I've seen worse, much owrse - Amit Morson

Spaghetti anyone? - Håkan Dahlström

Here are some pics of a datacenter I put together for a client back in 2003 with some pretty insane cabling. With this much cabling, it was too hard to manage without automation. So I built some tools that allowed me to plan for rapid growth (i.e 20 server SAN jumped to 120+ while we were building out) http://bit.ly/9Q7O - jh

Grunt: OK boss, I've got a new cable crimped. Where do you want it? Boss: Server 99,9999 port 1. See it? I'll see you in a week. Grunt: &^* - Shane

"Employees dismantling sections of Google's original data center discovered the decaying corpse of an engineer tangled in a web of network patch cables, police reported today. The mostly-skeletal remains have not been conclusively identified, though the victim appeared to have been wearing a 'Banyan Vines' t-shirt. While forensic tests have yet to be completed, the County Medical Examiner has estimated the date of death to be 'sometime around the 1999, 2000 timeframe.'" - Karim

"A police spokeperson said foul play was not suspected, adding, 'Unfortunately, this is not the first time we've seen this. The Internet was growing so rapidly back then, these things just happened. Someone goes in to work on a patch panel, and they get tangled up. It's sad. And I don't blame Google for not noticing -- their headcount was growing rapidly too. One or two engineers go missing, nobody notices. I bet the poor bastard is still getting direct deposit on his paychecks.'" - Karim

A spokesperson for Google referred to the grisly discovery as "a regrettable loss, but not a single point of failure," and added that engineers are currently required to use "the buddy system" to work in pairs when cabling servers. - Karim

Karim, you owe me a keyboard sir! - FFing Enigma (aka Tina)

Looks like spaghetti. - Rochelle

I've seen worse. Karim, that was funny! :D - AJ Batac

We'd like to see FriendFeed's datacenter pics! - AJ Batac

Datacenter is the new black - Burak Arikan

Most datacenters I've ever been in don't allow photography. The exception was the Stanford Linear Accelerator data center that Scoble got me into: http://www.flickr.com/photos... - Thomas Hawk

AJ, we're trying to avoid spending too much money, so our datacenter pictures would be a lot less interesting than Google's. Here's a photo of one of our servers though: http://friendfeed.com/e... - Paul Buchheit

One of the walls (supposedly the one they began with) at eBay's datacenter in Sunnyvale looked very much the same about 5 years ago. - earlyadopter