“U.S. Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal in San Jose, Calif., ordered Google within two days to disclose what terms it’s using to find documents Apple has requested in pretrial information sharing, and to tell Apple which Google employees those documents came from,” writes Bloomberg Business Week. “Google had argued the collection of information would be too burdensome.”

Hilarity ensued.

“The court cannot help but note the irony that Google, a pioneer in searching the Internet, is arguing that it would be unduly burdened by producing a list of how it searched its own files,”  Grewal wrote in a footnote to his order.

Apple took the step of asking the judge to intervene because it believed the search terms Google was using in response to Apple’s document production requests weren’t inclusive enough, and so left things out.

“Apple believes Google purposely uses suboptimal search terms,” writes the FossPatents blog. “For example, Apple claims to know that Google uses a different term internally for what Apple calls ‘slide to unlock.’ As a result, searches for ‘slide to unlock’ wouldn’t deliver too many documents in which Google employees discussed this patented technology. ”

(Why is Google involved in the Samsung case in the first place? Because all of the products said to be infringing run the Android operating system that Google developed.)

Apple was also criticized by the judge for not being more cooperative, such as by telling Google what documents it thought were missing. As you may recall, the 2006 rules for electronic discovery require the different sides in a legal suit to work together and agree on how they will search for documents.

There is, of course, more to the story.

“Warren, a lawyer for Google who is also representing Samsung, explained to the judge that turning over the requested information Apple is seeking could lead to ‘future discovery that we don’t think they’re entitled to’ and give the company ‘ideas about how to proceed that they wouldn’t have had,’” writes BGR.

Good story though.

Virtualization. In talking about how under-utilized data center servers are, and in appearing to limiting himself to less than state-of-the-art facilities, Glanz failed to notice how prevalent virtualization is becoming, which enables an organization to set up numerous “virtual servers” inside a physical server — which, in the process, results in much higher utilization.  ”[V]irtualized systems can be easily run at greater than 50% utilization rates, and cloud systems at greater than 70%,” writes Clive Longbottom in SearchDataCenter.

“[I]n many cases the physical “server” doesn’t even exist since everyone doing web at scale makes extensive use of virtualization, either by virtualizing at the OS level and running multiple virtual machines (in which case, yes, perhaps that one machine is bigger than a desktop, but it runs several actual server processes in it) or distributing the processing and storage at a more fine-grained level,” writes Diego Doval in his critique of the New York Times piece. “There’s no longer a 1-1 correlation between “server” and “machine,” and, increasingly, “servers” are being replaced by services.”

“Although the article mentions virtualization and the cloud as possible solutions to improve power utilization, VMware is not mentioned,” agrees Dan Woods in Forbes‘ critique of the piece. “If the reporter talked to VMware or visited their web site, he would have found massive amounts of material that documents how thousands of data centers are using virtualization to increase server utilization.”

Storage. Similarly, Glanz appeared to not be aware of advances in storage technology, even though some of them are taking place in the very data centers he lambasted in his articles. In Prineville, Ore., for example, not all that far from the Quincy, Wash., data centers he criticized, Facebook is working on designing its own storage to eliminate unnecessary parts, as well as setting up low-cost slow-access storage that is spun down most of the time.

Facebook — which does this research precisely because of the economies of scale in its massive data centers — is making similar advances in servers. Moreover, the company’s OpenCompute initiative is releasing all these advances to the computer industry in general to help it take advantage of them, too.

In addition, Glanz focused on the “spinning disks” of the storage systems, apparently not realizing that increasingly organizations like eBay are moving to solid-state “flash” storage technology that use much less power.

Also, storage just isn’t as big a deal as it used to be and as the story makes out. “A Mr Burton from EMC lets slip that the NYSE ‘produces up to 2,000 gigabytes of data per day that must be stored for years’,” reports Ian Bitterlin of Data Center Dynamics in its critique of the New York Times piece. “A big deal?  No, not really, since a 2TB (2,000 gigabytes) hard-drive costs $200 – less than a Wall Street trader spends on lunch!”

Disaster recovery. Glanz also criticized data centers for redundancy — particularly their having diesel generators on-site to deal with power failures — apparently not realizing that such redundancy is necessary to make sure the data centers stay up.

And yet, even with all this redundancy, there have been a number of well-publicized data center failures in recent months caused by events as mundane as a thunderstorm. Such outages can cost up to $200,000 per hour for a single company — and a data center such as Amazon’s can service multiple companies. If anything, one might argue that the costs of downtime require more redundancy, not less.

Of course it’s important to ensure that data centers are making efficient use of power, but it’s also important to understand the context.

This works for anything, whether you’re talking about logistics shipping to the Gulf War, moving cross-country, or organizing the pantry. It’s also the same theory behind virtualization – if you get a whole bunch of little processors working together well enough, they’re at least as good as one big processor, because you can keep adding little processors to them.

Traditionally, storage companies have worked by making bigger and bigger boxes; it’s part of what has kept companies like EMC and IBM in business, because really big boxes cost a lot of money.

However, we’re increasingly seeing cases where users are, instead, getting a whole bunch of little boxes to work together. It’s only worth the effort if you are, yourself, a great big company, so that a) you have the expertise around to hire people to get the little boxes to work together better and b) buying all the big boxes you would need just costs too darn much and it actually does save you money to find a way to let little boxes do it.

This is where companies like Facebook, Backblaze, and now Netflix come in. (And, likely, companies such as Google, but they don’t talk about it — though if you Google YouTube and “content delivery network” on the Google site, you sure end up with a lot of interesting patents.)

Backblaze has been patting itself on the, well, back for being the inspiration behind Netflix’ move, but really, the credit goes to the moving companies that figured out that, instead of sending gigantic trucks to all sorts of places to pick up stuff to move it, instead they should send a bunch of storage containers to the people who are moving, let the people fill them up, and then drive around and pick up all the storage containers. This was called a pod, and Backblaze called its similar system — a standardized bunch of storage and hardware and software to manage it — a Storage Pod.

(When you think about it, we’re even moving that way with coffee, with those little K -Cup things. And, really, it’s how the Internet itself works — instead of trying to send one large message, it breaks all the messages up into packets of the same size and then reassembles them at the other end, because the simplicity of only having to transport a single size of packets is worth the effort to break the message up and reassemble it.)

So, what Netflix decided was, rather than building a centralized gigundo data center with a ton of storage in it to hold all the movies, instead it would build a whole bunch of standardized pods — which it is calling the Open Connect Architecture — and placing the pods all over the country so the data doesn’t have to go as far.

True, if you’re renting something esoteric they’ll probably have it in some main office somewhere, but it’s a pretty safe bet that you’re renting one of the ten most popular movies of the past six months. It’s basically the same method behind Redbox — take care of the 80% of movie watchers and then figure out how to deal with the other 20%. So far Netflix is only taking care of 5% of its data this way, but it expects to ship most of its data this way in the future.

This sort of system only works if you’re really big — in the case of Netflix, streaming a billion hours of programming a month. The announcement hammered the stock of the vendors Netflix has been using to deliver its content, and there’s some dire warnings about what it means to big storage vendors like EMC, but, practically speaking, most companies just don’t operate on the economies of scale to make it worthwhile to do on their own.