On Thu, Mar 22, 2007 at 02:03:51PM +0200, guy keren wrote: > they use a replicating file-system + lots of communicatoins redundancy + > monitoring software + lots of technicians and spare parts, to get the > reliability they want.
I see two problems with that. One is that the average technician in Silicon Valley costs more in salary and benefits than most small companies spend on their entire computing budget. The second is that Google did not start out intending to be big. They started out as a four guys in a house who intended to do a better job of a search engine than existed at the time. Their main competition, Alta Vista, was sponsored by DEC and used DEC hardware. Google wanted to start small and cheap and used PCs running Linux. The irony of it is that if DEC had commericalized Alta Vista instead of running it as a public service, they would probably still be in business today. Then we would all be running Alphas in X86 emulation mode instead of P4s. :-) If Google had known the size they would become, they may have chosen different hardware. Their approach works, but the hidden costs (personel, parts inventory, software development of managment systems, etc) are awfully high. Geoff. -- Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel [EMAIL PROTECTED] N3OWJ/4X1GM IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 Fax ONLY: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice: 1-215-821-1838 Visit my 'blog at http://geoffstechno.livejournal.com/ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
