posted on Tuesday, May 24, 2005 10:50 AM
by
Jonathan Hodgson
Google's hardware
We were discussing some of the hardware behind google.com today, and so I found these statistics.
- Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed.
- Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster.
- Over 30 clusters.
- One petabyte of data in a cluster -- so much that hard disk error rates of 10-15 begin to be a real issue.
- Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster.
- An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters.
- No complete system failure since February 2000.
I also remembered reading this PDF article on the distributed Google File System.
It would be interesting to compare similar figures for amazon.com, microsoft.com, etc. Also found some info here on bbc.co.uk from Sun.
As much as I think Microsoft executes really well, I do like this side of google where Ben Rathbone painted one of their data centers.