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Google Prefers DRAM to Hard Disks
KP writes: "I came across this interview with Google's CEO. A very interesting
read." It's interesting in part becase that CEO (Eric Schmidt) claims that for Google's purposes, "it costs less money and it is more efficient to use DRAM as storage as opposed to hard disks." "I still cannot figure out how he says storing data on DRAM is
cheaper than storing it on hard-disks. Maybe, if you buy in bulk?"
How often do you see DRAM fail compared to Hard Disks? A bit more reliability IMHO.
Google reads all the newspapers on the Web every hour and constructs a newspaper for the world by computer--no humans are involved.
Now if only Google could go out and do its own fact-checking, it wouldn't need to rely on other newspapers at all. Mark my words, by 2010 google will be the only place you go when you need information. Forget askjeeves, try listentogoogle. No humans will be involved. Scary.
By the way, this guy can't speak for beans.
The speech I give everyday is: "This is what we do. Is what you are doing consistent with that, and does it change the world?"
It's important to note, though, that he states DRAM is more efficient (cost-wise? speed-wise? whatever) when it comes to storing seekable data. I wonder if that means they're using DRAM for their search indices and plain old disk for their cached content. DRAM is ideal for completely random access to multiple pieces of data, whereas disk does okay for serial access to data, the location of which is well known.
Lots of other posters have mentioned pieces of the puzzle, so I risk being redundant here. But, it seems the whole equation goes something like this:
1. If each box only handles a part of the web, it is possible that most of the space on it's drive (or drives) are wasted anyway.
2. If disk latency means that cpus spend idle time, eliminating that latency means more throughput per box, hence fewer boxes. More money spent on DRAM, less money spent on CPU, power supplies, etc.
3. Even with same number of boxes, lower power draw, smaller and/or fewer UPS(s) required. With fewer boxes, even more reduction.
4. Which leads, of course, to lower A/C bills during the warm weather.
5. Fewer boxes, fewer pieces, whatever, means fewer things breaking. The impact of a single outage may be greater, but, from the cost standpoint, you need fewer man-hours to manage the outages, fewer spare-parts, etc.
6. Lower medical expenses from sysadmins going insane due to the noise from all those drives and the associated larger power supplies and extra cooling fans.
OK, that last item is a stretch, but how many sysadmins are more than a step from insanity anyway?
Another service that takes advantage of recency is something we just added called Overview of Today's Headlines. Google reads all the newspapers on the Web every hour and constructs a newspaper for the world by computer--no humans are involved.
This is a pretty cool idea. I only hope they make a RSS feed out of it so that I can use it in my companies new Portal environment. That would be really great! I love Google!
Check it out here.
KangarooBox - We make IT simple!
DRAM requires little electricity and produces almost no heat.
Hard disks consume large amounts of electricity, and produce large amounts of heat, since they consist of pieces of metal spinning at 7200rpm.
Using DRAM upfront costs quite a bit more, but uses less electricity and requires fewer chillers, condensors, etc to keep cool.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK