I've just made some corrections to the post. I was going off memory when I originally wrote it. After re-reading the relevant passage from the book again I've corrected the number of terabytes that Google needed to transmit - it was more like 9 TB. And they transmitted the whole lot over two nights in one month, not three nights. Sorry for the confusion.
It was on page 187-188 of Steven Levy's book "In the Plex" and the two people he's quoting are Urs Hölzle and Jim Reese, who were both involved in Google's infrastructure.
It was on page 187-188 of Steven Levy's book "In the Plex" and the two people he's quoting are Urs Hölzle and Jim Reese, who were both involved in Google's infrastructure.