Google keeps its hardware cheap, simple

ITWorldCanada - "Cheap and fast" hardware is the way to go, according to Craig Nevill-Manning, a senior research scientist at Google Inc.

Speaking at the 13th annual IBM Centres for Advanced Studies Conference (CASCON) on Tuesday in Toronto, Nevill-Manning offered some insight into the search engine company's processes -- including its lack of spending on hardware.

"Cheap hardware allows more computation per query," he said, explaining that the trade-off between software and hardware is that the software is written with the assumption that the hardware will fail -- so Google tries to keep the hardware simple.

"We want to exploit the processing and the power of the off-the-shelf hardware," he explained as part of a keynote address at the software developer conference.

This 'fast and cheap' mantra at Mountain View, Calif.-based Google resonates through the more than 10,000 servers used by query searchers worldwide, turning over more than 200 million search queries a day among 4 billion Web documents.

By using commodity PC hardware, which is similar to that of home PCs, Google buys cheap and builds high levels of redundancy into its system in an effort to compensate for the fact that one full day of Google use on a server is the equivalent of 40 machine years, Nevill-Manning said.

"Each server has many twins," he said. "Replication is needed for scalability."

This is where Google compensates for its use of inexpensive hardware: by ensuring that replication of the computers exists at many different levels and over a wide array of the various types of servers used in Google's data centers. As a result, there are many identical data centers around the world, Nevill-Manning added.

Because of the replication, maintenance on the servers can be taken at a slower pace, where some computers might not even be online within a week or more. The company also uses a monitoring system to watch the health of both computers and applications and knows instantly when there is a machine failure.

"Because the system is built this way, if a machine goes down, it doesn't have to be repaired right away," he said. "We can save money by doing this in a lazy fashion."

While the days of its garage operations and its cork-insulated aluminium data center racks are over, the company still believes in "fast and cheap," and continues to follow its mission of organizing the world's information, making it universally accessible and useful.

The mandate might seem broad, but the impetus to keep query searches relevant, while still being "fast and good,"