I'm more interested in the built in atomic clock and gps synchronization. Could this make one of Googles data clusters a more broadly available commodity?
I don't quite understand your question but if you're just interested in a Stratum 1 time server you can build it yourself with an rPi and a GPS.
I'm referring to Google's Spanner database, which relies heavily on time (and thus GPS calibrated atomic clocks) for consistency across DCs.
This reads very much like an advertorial, but I don't see a note about it being sponsored content.
embedded.com is one of many industry rags run by UBM, which is "the largest B2B event and media company in the world". They crank out articles in highly specialized fields and slap lots of conference invitations and links to paid subscriptions everywhere.