[no subject]

"Nobody builds servers as unreliably as we do," Mr. Hölzle said in a speech
last year at CERN, the Swiss particle physics institute. Google is reducing
cost while maintaining performance by shifting the burden of reliability
from hardware to software ? individual hardware components can fail, but
software automatically shifts the local task and the data to other machines.

For example, Google designed a software system it calls the Google File
System that keeps copies of data in several places so Google does not have
to worry when one of its cheap servers fails. This approach also means that
it does not have to make regular backup copies of its data as other
companies do.

. . .

While Google's servers are built on inexpensive parts, the designs it uses
have been modified every year or so, to improve their efficiency and
increasingly to customize them to Google's applications. The current
generation uses the powerful Opteron chip from Advanced Micro Devices, which
uses less power than the Intel chips Google had used.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/03/technology/03google.html

(registration required )-:  but at least it's still free for most articles)

--
Bobby G.