Geoff - when it will be _you_ who manage to run a multi-billion company,
and not google, i'll listen to you, rather then look at what they did.
the fact is - there are ways to use cheap hardware to get a reliable,
scaleable and maintainable service. i only wanted to bring a
counter-example to what you said - it's you who brought up google as a
good example, after all.
--guy
Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
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.
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