Google’s containers are real. And it’s not an April Fool’s Joke.
Four years after the first reports of server-packed shipping
containers lurking in parking garages, Google today confirmed
its use of data center containers and provided a group of
industry engineers with an overview of how they were implemented
in the company’s first data center project in the fall of 2005.
“It’s certainly more fun talking about it than keeping it a
secret,” said Google’s Jimmy Clidaras, who gave a presentation
on the containers at the first Google Data center Efficiency
Summit today in Mountain View, Calif. “Water was a big concern,”
said Urs Holzle, who heads Google’s data center operations. “You
never know how well these couplings (on the water lines) work in
real life. It turns out they work pretty well. At the time,
there was nothing to go on.” Google was awarded a patent on a
portable data center  in a shipping container in October 2008,
confirming a 2005 report from PBS columnist Robert Cringley that
the company was buil