There was a message thread on Slashdot.org a couple of years ago regarding Google's infrastructure. I chimed in with your exact same comment that Google should take a serious look at zLinux. As expected my mainframe bias didn't go over too well with the great unwashed.
Mark Jacobs -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List on behalf of Paul Gilmartin Sent: Sat 10/16/2010 9:22 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: When will MVS be able to use cheap dasd On Thu, 14 Oct 2010 11:22:18 -0400, Anne & Lynn Wheeler wrote: > >post from similar thread in this n.g. from 2007 >http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007h.html#13 Question on DASD Hardware > >with references to commodity disk having MTBF in the million-plus hrs >and google's (then) recently published study: "Failure Trends in a Large >Disk Drive Population" (invluving more than 100,000 drives). > >there was similar but different study from the period that Google's >computing infrastructure was about 1/3rd of the cost (including doing >their own assembly, management, maintenance) compared to ordering from >brand name vendor ... by carefully studying which components to buy in >quantity and puttting them together themselves. > Google is reported to operate its enterprise on tens of thousands of commodity PCs running Linux. (But there were reports last January of Google's suffering an attack by a Windows virus.) Given Google's pragmatism, and the economic advantages of IBM mainframes often touted here, I wonder why Google doesn't replace some of those PCs with a smaller number of z10s or z196s likewise running Linux. The software conversion costs should be minimal, or at worst within Google's resources. Might it be that there's no practical way to attach those commodity disks to a z? -- gil ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
