On Jan 9, 2004, at 7:57 AM, Gabriel Wicke wrote:
A quote: Google's infrastructure: Google uses consumer-level hard disks and 'really cheap, unreliable memory.' ('If something fails, it's not you, it's probably the memory.') They have around 10,000 commodity-level Linux computers set up in a parallel network ('the largest Linux cluster in the world'), and anticipate the death of 'a few machines every day.' Their network is set up to be able to route around a failed machine instantly.
Google also has a much larger hardware budget than we do, and a small army of PhD developers working on their code. ;)
... much pricing data follows ...
Do these Dell prices include support? Ideally, it would be nice not to have to worry about people having to drive all over the place to fix a small hardware error. That's the biggest reason (IMO) for buying a Dell machine - if we're were not going to take advantage of their support contracts, then we would probably be better off buying cheaper, faster machines elsewhere.
-- Nick Reinking -- eschewing obfuscation since 1981 -- Minneapolis, MN