On Jul 4, 8:29 am, Roy Schestowitz <newsgro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Google: one million servers and counting
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | Gartner reckons that Google now make use of more than 1 million
> | servers, spitting out search results, images, videos, emails and ads.
> `----
>
> http://www.pandia.com/sew/481-gartner.html
I wonder if even Google actually knows how many servers they have. :-D
I was surprised to find that Google has localized servers in addition
to the multiple American sites listed in the article. They also have
servers in a few cities in India, an probably in several other
countries as wall. Given that most of the servers are blade servers,
connected to arrays of 200+ gig drives, it's probably a challenge to
keep track of how many are in service at a given time.
I think Google has estimated that they had around 1/2 million servers.
Linux and OSS are a critical part of the Google business model. They
need thousands of fast databases, all capable of locating relevant
documents several hundred times/second. I believe they also use DB2,
but I'm not sure what the licensing is like. My guess is that they
get a "quantity discount" that's probably pretty substantial.
Even the technology is based on OSS. Google is a great grand-baby of
the WAIS servers developed as OSS software back around 1990 by
Brewster Kahle of Thinking Machines, who later formed WAIS. WAIS was
purchased by AOL, who still uses the core technology, with
enhancements, but not before WAIS had released OSS versions, and had
granted unlimited distribution rights to Verity.
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