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July 3, 2006

New York Times Looks At Google's Hardware & Infrastructure

A New York Times article has a detailed analysis of Google's infrastructure and discussion with Urs Hölzle, senior vice president for operations at Google. Here are some of the key points I pulled from that article.

+ Google tends builds from ground up versus buying.
+ Google's computing costs are half those of other large Internet companies and a tenth those of traditional corporate technology users.
+ Critics call Google's philosophy "unnecessary and inefficient."
+ "Google is reducing cost while maintaining performance by shifting the burden of reliability from hardware to software — individual hardware components can fail, but software automatically shifts the local task and the data to other machines."
+ Google is among Advanced Micro's five largest clients.

Posted by Barry Schwartz on July 3, 2006 9:51 AM