> does naybody know if Google's qualified Planners are looking at the > TCO (total cost of ownership) to justify 100k servers versus > SUN/AIX/zOS/zVM solutions? > or is it philosophical and their investors/board of directors want to > show innovation as a way to increase capitalization?
They watch this very closely. Their 100K servers are directly derived from: 1) The Google algorithm(s) are computationally intensive as well as I/O intensive (more MIPS=better search performance). 2) The workload is rarely sequential processing (ie every new piece of work is essentially a new problem, so prefetch or setup doesn't really help much) 3) They need very low price/MIP ratios. 1U netbooted boxes (most of their machines don't even HAVE disks, just CPU and network) are essentially disposable at the volume that Google buys them -- 5000 to 10000 at a time. It is *literally* cheaper to do machine-level replacement -- repair costs more than just dumping it and replacing it with a newer/faster machine. It also provides them with a rolling technology upgrade capability without shutdown for maintenance. AOL has a similar strategy -- don't repair anything, replace it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
