Google runs on cheap, failure prone machines, and is loving it!

[astro]

Interesting article on Google technology

Peeking Into Google

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.

“The downside to cheap machines is, you have to make them work together reliably,” Hoelzle said. “These things are cheap and easy to put together. The problem is, these things break.”

[Bill_H]

Well, they’re cheap, but they’re redundant. I run a service (much smaller than Google obviously) in a similar fashion. In fact, I happen to know I use the same hardware manufacturer as Google. When we have a failure, we have immediate failover. Also, even though they’re cheap, we find hardware failure is very rare.

[Leaper]

“We’ve been running with awful machinery! I love it!”