Google Revealed: The IT Strategy That Makes It Work
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| That hands-on approach, born of the frugality of a garage startup,
| persists because Google's scale demands it. Google has between 200,000
| and 450,000 servers spread among up to 65 data centers, depending on how
| you define them and who's doing the counting. And those numbers continue
| to rise.
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| The company won't discuss these estimates; it considers such numbers to be
| a competitive advantage. In fact, one of the things Google likes about
| open source software is that it facilitates secrecy. "If we had to go and
| buy software licenses, or code licenses, based on seats, people would
| absolutely know what the Google infrastructure looks like," DiBona says.
| "The use of open source software, that's one more way we can control our
| destiny."
|
| Google organizes its machines, which run Linux, into "cells," which
| DiBona describes as a kind of disk drive for Internet services. (Not to
| be confused with Gdrive, the long-rumored Google hosted storage service.
| "There is no Gdrive," a spokeswoman insists.) Software programs reside
| on racks of inexpensive computers, and programmers decide how much
| redundancy to give them. The cells take the place of commercial storage
| equipment; DiBona says Google's cells are cheaper to create and maintain,
| and he hints they can handle more data, too.
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http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192300292
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