Google's secret of success? Dealing with failure

BURLINGAME, Calif.--The technical wizardry behind Google's successful search engine may come down to a blindingly obvious insight: PCs crash.

On Wednesday, Urs Hoelzle, a vice president of engineering and of operations at the search giant, shed some light on how Google's data centers operate. Many people consider the company's operations expertise more valuable than the actual search algorithms that launched the enterprise.

Hoelzle spoke at EclipseCon, a conference for application programmers that's going on till Thursday here.

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What's new:
At EclipseCon, Urs Hoelzle, a vice president of engineering and of operations at the search giant, shed some light on how Google's data centers operate.

Bottom line:
According to Hoelzle, Google has inexpensively built out its computing infrastructure by using thousands of "commodity" servers, instead of fewer high-end, and high-priced, machines. The trick is to make these racks of hardware work together and to ensure that the failure of one machine doesn't derail an operation.

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The way Google has been able to build out its computing infrastructure for millions, rather than tens of millions, of dollars is by buying relatively cheap machines. Looking at hardware costs, company engineers saw that purchasing a few high-end servers, with eight or more powerful processors, costs significantly more than dozens of simpler "commodity" servers.

The trick is to make these racks of hardware operate in tandem and to ensure that the failure of one machine does not derail an operation, such as returning a search query or serving up an ad.

Consider a home PC, Hoelzle said. Optimistically, a consumer PC might crash once in three years from a software glitch or hardware problem.

"At Google scale...if you have thousands of PCs, you can expect one (failure) a day," he said. "So you better deal with that in an automated way, or you will have service outages."

Google, known for its rigorous hiring practices aimed at attracting the brightest minds in computer science, has created a number of software tools to handle its computing installation.

The company wrote its own file system, called Google File System, which is optimized for handling large, 64 megabyte blocks of data. Significantly, the file system was designed to assume that a failure, such as a failed disk or unplugged network cable, can happen at any time.

Data is replicated in three places, and there is a "master" machine that

[unixrules]

Crash once every three years?????

He obviously has not been using Windows.

[unixrules]

Crash once every three years?????

He obviously has not been using Windows.

[aa]

Are Google's SERPs as Relevant as they were 2 Years Ago?

The Bottom line is relevancy. The labs add-ons are certainly very helpful. But - has Google's SERPs decreased in relevancy in the past two years.

It seems that between suddenly dropped sites and too much emphasis on link analysis, it is becoming more of an effort to get good results for some searches.

[aa]

Are Google's SERPs as Relevant as they were 2 Years Ago?

The Bottom line is relevancy. The labs add-ons are certainly very helpful. But - has Google's SERPs decreased in relevancy in the past two years.

It seems that between suddenly dropped sites and too much emphasis on link analysis, it is becoming more of an effort to get good results for some searches.

Yahoo already did this.

I mean they're not as sophisticated as google, but Yahoo has pretty much done the same thing already for many years.

Yahoo already did this.

I mean they're not as sophisticated as google, but Yahoo has pretty much done the same thing already for many years.

Not all that new news...

One of there engeneers were talking about this 4 months ago... the video is here http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.asp?rid=2459

Not all that new news...

One of there engeneers were talking about this 4 months ago... the video is here http://www.uwtv.org/programs/displayevent.asp?rid=2459