[ILUG] Google Job

[Sean Rima]

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Justin Mason wrote:
|
| kevin lyda writes:
|
|>>On Fri, Apr 02, 2004 at 12:37:40PM +0100, Conor Wynne wrote:
|>>
|>>>Storage is bloddy expensive, and google would be using fibre arrays I
|>>>would imagine and they can cost millions - vendor depending.
|>>>But they have obviously thought this through, and its april 2nd so
we know
|>>>its not bull ;--0
|>>
|>>it's my understanding that google mainly uses commodity hardware.
|>>to get google's scale i would guess that they would have:
|>>
|>>    1.  s/w to distribute data among many machines (note the google fs).
|>>    2.  a system to bring up new machines with little human intervention
|>>        behond physically moving them.
|>>    3.  a system for identifying boxes behaving badly.  either a
|>>        physical indicator on the box, or a print out, or some sort of
|>>        pda based system.  i'd lean towards the middle one.  walk the
|>>        machine room once a day and rip out dead boxes, put in new boxes.
|>>    4.  an agreement with a computer company (or two) to pick up dead
|>>        machines and drop of good ones - all within certain specs.
|>>
|>>that leads to an efficient of labour and low equipment costs.  assuming
|>>i'm anywhere close to right in my guess, i'd kind of hope they work at
|>>making sure those machines are energy efficient, and that they or their
|>>suppliers do more than just chuck the "dead" machines.
|>>
|>>regardless of the solution, everything i've read about google indicates
|>>they don't use exotic hardware solutions.
|
|
| yep, agreed.
|
| The filesystem doc is very interesting -- it indicates how Google's design
| uses massively redundant arrays of inexpensive PCs with COTS hardware.
| When a PC dies, they don't even take it off the rack.
|
| Given that (very smart) design, it really doesn't matter how crappy the
| hardware is.  Very nicely done!
|

Actualluy if you have access to the spamcop nntp server, this whole
topic has been discussed there and they seem to be thinking that it
maybe a hoax

Sean
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