On Fri, 09 Jan 2004 08:48:52 -0600, Nick Reinking wrote:
Google also has a much larger hardware budget than we do, and a small army of PhD developers working on their code. ;)
The point is- Google would need at least double their current budget if they went for high-end hardware with the same performance.
From http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/03/1352239:
Almost all the technology we use to support our server farm is home-grown. The system we've built is so efficient we can maintain more than 10,000 computers with a handful of ops folks. Of course, we benefit a lot from our massive redundancy: Unlike many companies, we don't need to worry immediately if a computer, or two, or a hundred, die, because the dead computers have lots of clones. --
About work: We set up redundancy and completely automatic failover anyway, there's nothing else to develop. The only additional work is copying the hd images over to new boxes and configuring ip/hostname (if not done with dhcp). We should have a development box (could use Apache number six for the beginning) that serves as the template. A small rsync script and we should be ready to update all boxes at once, there would be little difference if there are 4 Apaches, 6 or 12.