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Google Now Has Servers at Most ISPs, for the Fastest Access

Google has a network for cache servers at ISPs around the world

Jul 23, 2013 19:06 GMT  ·  By
Google data centers are great, but sometimes, a few servers in the right place can do wonders
   Google data centers are great, but sometimes, a few servers in the right place can do wonders

Google is very proud of its data centers and for good reasons, they are some of the most advanced in the industry, if not the most. The company likely has the most of them, as well. It's no surprise, since, according to some reports, it now accounts for 25 percent of internet traffic in the US.

While Google is very secretive about its data centers and how they work, it has been giving us more peaks inside in recent years, though mostly to brag about the innovative and environmentally friendly cooling solutions the company has implemented.

But there has been another interesting trend in recent years, the move beyond the data center. Of course, all of the company's data and its products run on its many data centers, with information duplicated at various locations around the world for faster local access and redundancy.

However, you can only build so many data centers. A simpler solution to getting data as fast and as cheap as possible to users is the Google Global Cache network. At this point, Google has servers at various locations at all major American ISPs.

"With GGC, network operators and Internet Service Providers deploy a small number of Google servers inside their network to serve popular Google content, including YouTube. Google's traffic management system directs users to the node that will provide the best performance for the user," Google explains.

These host only the most accessed data and it's where users land first when requesting resources from a Google product. It's only if the data isn't found in the cache that requests are sent further upstream, to the actual data centers.

This strategy has the advantage of improving speeds for most users, while reducing costs for ISPs and being relatively inexpensive for Google.

"GGC can be located anywhere in an operator's network to maximize savings in backbone and transit bandwidth. Targeted deployment can reduce the number of route-miles traveled on an operator's network to serve Google traffic, further increasing cost savings for the operator," it adds.