Draconis Software Blog

There’s an interesting article in the NY Times about Google’s infrastructure strategies.  As it’s been the talk of many folks for a while now, Google has spent a lot of time and brainpower creating their own infrastructure more or less from scratch: they build their own computers, they have their own file system, etc.  From the article:

In many ways, it still has the head of an graduate-school project grafted onto the body of an multinational corporation. The central tenet of its strategy is that its growing cadre of world-class computer scientists can design a network of machines that can store and process more information more efficiently than anyone else.

Mr. Reynolds estimated that Google’s computing costs are half those of other large Internet companies and a tenth those of traditional corporate technology users.

Interesting, but before you start thinking of building your own servers and file systems, remember that Google can benefit greatly from economies of scale: the extra time spent building those thousands of servers translates into greater savings; for most organizations, you might save a few hundred or thousand bucks going the DIY route, but you’ll be spending even more money in researching/building the five or so systems yourself to not make it worthwhile.

Anyway, a good read if nothing else for the WOW factor.