I agree. To google the computer that they have custom designed and
programmed is their factor. It produces their product. Thus for them
the development of this machine is like GM building their auto assembly
line. Thought of in that light the extra development cost is a more
reasonable expense than it would be for a business that uses computers as
adjuncts to the actual manufacture of product. The point is that the
customization has a direct rather than an indirect lever on their ability
to produce.
They get to a $1000 per server because they don't even buy blades, or rack
optimized Intel servers, they buy parts. Of course they have to amortize
their development expense and assembly cost which adds to people dollars.
The development is amortized over a volume of thousands. Thus they have a
superniche. Once they have their infrastructure in place for search it is
much easier for them to build applications to work there than to customize
new infrastructure around other applications. Finally they save on
development because they use long standing research in parallel processing,
which has been popular because of entry cost for at least 20 years.
The questions become:
Does the infrastructure break as some level of scale? If seems that some
cracks are appearing.
Are they too inefficient with environmentals? This changes with oil @ ~$75
per barrel.
Are they using too many people? This one would be hard to extract. The
people they use to run this thing are their factory workers which business
tend to view differently than IT operations. In another solution at least
some of the same people would likely have other tasks, but would not
necessarily go away.
Finally there is the question Can anything else do the job? The answer
to this is not clear either. My guess is that a successful replacement
would either be a standard yet still very distributed solution like blades,
or a niche technology solution with lots of cores per chip, or a heavily
virtualized system like z Linux. or some hybrid. Simply replacing their
nodes with fewer larger nodes will probably not do it.
Joe Temple
Distinguished Engineer
Sr. Certified IT Specialist
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
845-435-6301 295/6301 cell 914-706-5211
Home office 845-338-1448 Home 845-338-8794
shogunx
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]
ak.ath.cx> To
Sent by: Linux on [email protected]
390 Port cc
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]
IST.EDU> Subject
Re: Google out of capacity?
05/05/2006 02:02
AM
Please respond to
Linux on 390 Port
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]
IST.EDU>
On Fri, 5 May 2006, Vic Cross wrote:
> On 05/05/2006, at 5:53am, Fargusson.Alan wrote:
>
> > A long time ago I read that they did TCO studies, and found it less
> > costly to buy lots of low cost hardware over buying fewer high cost
> > systems.
>
> "A long time ago" is the point. When I read similar, the server
> count was around 8000 -- it would seem that they've grown
> considerably beyond that now. I doubt they've updated their TCO
> analysis accordingly... :)
The real question is could a z9 outprocess existing clusters, out scale
them at the same rate, and do so in such a fashion as to make it
attractive to google to abandon its own in-house OS?
>
> Cheers,
> Vic Cross
>
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