A. Khattri wrote:
On Wed, 19 Apr 2006, kashani wrote:

I'm not sold on the Google approach.

        Assuming someone was to build nine data servers we're talking roughly
$3k per server (dual CPU, 4GB ram, raid 5 sata) or $30k with shipping
and tax.

Actually Google use the cheapest hardware they can find, buy in bulk, and
they assume stuff will fail so they plan accordingly. I very much doubt
they spend $3K per server...


Anyone trying to build the same with a purchase of less than 100 servers is not going to spend much less.

2 x 2GB RAM = $1000
2 x CPU = $500 or so
Raid Card = $300
Drives = $100 each
1u chassis/MB/etc = $500

IIRC they drop the drives and shove everything into RAM. Which is fine when you have a limited data set and enough machines to shove it into RAM. Originally Google did have a limited data set. It was only after the infrastructure reached a critical size that they began Google mail and other large storage things. And had fours years to work out the operational kinks.

I think it unlikely that someone with a single storage set has enough money or time to pay for a few Phds to write a custom filesystem, a few hundred servers (10TB/4GB), and the datacenter monkey necessary to replace gear constantly... oddly Google has both of these in spades. And if you read the whitepaper the smallest Google data cluster is nineteen servers, aka $40-60k for schleps like us, aka the cost of a SAN that that uses less power and burns less switch ports.

This infatuation with the Google stuff that very few people (ie none of us) have the in house infrastructure to handle or the available cash is useless. Unless someone has actually built their own mini Google and wants to tell us all about it with nice numbers like total cost, source code, transactions per second, cost per GB of user data, throughput, and other data points.

kashani
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