March 12, 2006
How Google does it?
One of the great wonders of the world is how Google can search billions of web pages and come back with its results so quickly. They also talk about how redundant their system is where all the data is replicated at different geographic locations. I thing is for sure, they aren't using Microsoft operating and file systems.To deal with the more than 10 billion Web pages and tens of terabytes of information on Google's servers, the company combines cheap machines with plenty of redundancy, Hoelzle said. Its commodity servers cost around $1,000 apiece, and Google's architecture places them into interconnected nodes. All machines run on a stripped-down Linux kernel. The distribution is Red Hat (Quote, Chart), but Hoelzle said Google doesn't use much of the distro. Moreover, Google has created its own patches for things that haven't been fixed in the original kernel.
