[Gllug] recommendation for external hard drive

[Richard Jones]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 02:18:32PM +0100, Hari Sekhon wrote:
> I read a couple years ago that Google ran their infrastructure of 
> servers with a single non-raided 80GB Maxtor in there, simply to be as 
> cheap as possible because it didn't matter if the system failed, their 
> proprietary layer on top deals with the resilience across large numbers 
> of nodes.
> 
> If that's true, then I'm not sure buying the same drives they buy would 
> be beneficial?

It seems to be the case that Google have an interesting proprietary
layer called the Google [Global?] File System which stores every block
of data 3 times (actually, the number of replicas is configurable).

There's a paper about it here:

http://labs.google.com/papers/gfs.html

Although it's called a "filesystem" it isn't presented to Linux
through the VFS layer.  It is accessed through C++ libraries.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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