Good piece in The Guardian re: google and Linux and that one of google’s strengths is their ability to leverage the Linux platform.
The computing engine that powers Google is the largest cluster of Linux servers in the history of the world. If you talk to computer-science folks, you find that they regard this – rather than the number of web pages indexed – as the most interesting thing about the company. Managing such a vast server-farm is a formidable task. For example, how do you implement security patches and operating-system upgrades (much more frequent in Linux than in proprietary systems from Microsoft or Sun) on thousands of servers without causing disruption to service? Google manages to achieve this with sophisticated techniques for rippling changes through the cluster, yet achieves 100 per cent uptime. This is serious stuff, and there are a lot of IT managers out there who would give their eye-teeth to be able to do it half as well.
What can’t you find on Google? Vital statistics [guardian.co.uk]
via Slashdot