I'm Feeling Lucky_ The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 - Douglas Edwards [84]
At her farewell party at a local Mexican restaurant, I said goodbye to the one other person at Google who completely understood the practice of branding for customer acquisition. Google didn't do that kind of marketing. The company rejected any attempt to graft traditional practices onto its new breed of business.
Over salsa and Dos Equis toasts, I resolved that I would remain open to new ideas and new approaches. I would make it work. I would prove to myself and to my ever-adaptable colleagues that this old Doug could still learn new tricks.
PART II
GOOGLE GROWS AND FINDS ITS VOICE
Beyond a startup.
Not yet a search behemoth.
Google's awkward phase.
Chapter 11
Liftoff
WHILE I HAD been trying to figure out what to do next, the engineers had been killing themselves to do the big, hard, complicated things that absolutely needed to be done. Their yearlong effort would come to fruition just about the time I started to get my bearings.
The engineering story began in June 1999—before I had even heard of Google. Jim Reese, the neurosurgeon turned sysadmin, had just been hired. On his first day, he arrived at eight a.m. and worked straight through for fourteen hours. The next day he came in a little later—about ten a.m.—to add backup servers to Google's intranet and to handle networking issues in the Plex. He left the office around four for an early dinner on his way to Exodus, Google's data center, where he stayed until five in the morning. He did the same the next day, and again every day that week, including Saturday and Sunday. His task, assigned by Larry without explanation, was to install two thousand new servers and bring them online.
That many computers wouldn't fit in the cage Google owned at the time, so Jim needed to arrange for additional space at the data center. "I worked as hard as I could," he said, "negotiating with facilities at Exodus. In 1999, cage space was hard to come by and Exodus was pretty full." Partly that was because of companies like eBay, whose cage was near Google's. "They had a cage ten or twenty times our size and they had perhaps eighty computers in it," Jim recalls, "whereas we had eighty computers in one rack." There were nine racks crowded into Google's cage—but, as Jim and his new associate Schwim realized when they looked closely, it wasn't at capacity.
"If we move every cabinet on this side of the cage three inches, we'll have exactly enough room to fit in another rack," Schwim pointed out, turning sideways to squeeze down the aisle. "The only problem is, there's no way to roll a rack through here. We'll have to take off the side cage wall." They called the facilities manager, described what they wanted, and left for lunch.
When they came back, the black chain-link fencing that had protected the side of Google's space had been unbolted and removed. Jim and Schwim slid the rack in, cabled the computers, connected them to the main switch with fiber, and flipped the switch. Everything lit up the way it was supposed to. Jim double-checked the connections at the back of the rack as Schwim stood at the front typing in commands to monitor its progress.
"It's a go!" Jim heard Schwim announce from the front of the rack.
"The next thing I knew," Jim recalls, "I'm sitting on my butt on the floor of the data center."
"We just lost the rack!" Schwim yelled. "What's going on?" He stepped around to the back and found Jim on his back, groggily rubbing the crown of his head, a two-hundred-pound metal crossbeam, smeared with blood, lying beside him where it had fallen from the top of the cage.
"Uh...," said Jim, shakily pointing upward toward a batch of severed cables that had lain in the beam's path, "we're going to need more fiber."
"You're the only neurosurgeon around," replied Schwim, assessing the situation with both concern and an engineer's practicality.