Google Two Years Into Overhaul of the Google File System 217
El Reg writes "As its ten-year-old file system — GFS — struggles to keep up with Gmail, YouTube, and other apps it was never designed to support, Google is brewing a replacement. According to the company, it's two years into a GFS sequel designed specifically for customer-facing apps that require ultra low latency."
It's not really GFS (Score:5, Insightful)
It's GoogleFS.
GFS refers to the Global File System [wikipedia.org], which is commonly used in Linux clustering environments.
By comparison, GoogleFS came second, is basically a no-name filesystem unknown to most of the IT world, because it's not available for use, hasn't been released as a product, compared to the well-established global filesystem.
It would certainly seem like the Global File system would have priority claim over the name GFS...
So let's stop calling Google's filesystem, which we'll probably never get to use GFS :)
Curiously (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
They use the Linux platform to the absolute max, leveraging all the blood and sweat Linux developers poured into its development over the past 15 years, and yet, not contributing back any of their most significant enhancements.
Not contributing back!? Dude, they gave us *google*. Remember what it was like before google? When internet search was basically voo-doo crapshoots, that worked 25% of the time? They gave us a search engine that actually *worked*. Before that, you basically had to bookmark or memorize internet sites that you liked. Good luck actually finding what you were looking for without having an actual site in mind beforehand.
I think that alone has probably spurred the development of free software. Imagine being able to *find things* on the internet!
Re:Curiously (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
If Google hadn't come along when it did, someone else would have stepped up.
Doesn't change the fact that it *was* them, who was able to do it when nobody else had been able to. So I think that yes, they did contribute a lot to open source development. It's not enough to have a good idea, or believe that someone will eventually get around to it; someone actually has to sit down and *do* it. If google hadn't done it then, we would be that much further behind in internet search technology.
Re:Seriously Folks (Score:3, Insightful)
Google has competitors?
Seriously, Microsoft has been promising a database driven filesystem for its server OS for years without delivering anything substantial to date, and it doesn't seem like they're running anything different internally either.
Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Put the crackpipe down!
I was an altavista user. A die-hard one, for most of the mid/late-nineties. In fact, I remember the day I finally convinced my boss to switch from Altavista to Google, because he had worked on Altavista.
Today's results completely blow away the search engines of 10 years ago. In fact, any of the major players -- Yahoo, Microsoft, even Ask & co. -- would blow away the search engines of 10 years ago.
(Add to the fact that the number of documents on the web that they need to crawl & rank have exploded.)
Your comment that "the resultant pile of URLs for any given keyword is utterly worthless" is itself hyperbolic nonsense. If that were true, nobody would use them.
Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google is IT done right... (Score:3, Insightful)
Not really, it's IT done by not letting anyone over 30 or with any experience into the room. Every single issue they had to learn and fix mentioned in the article is quite literally standard textbook stuff in distributed systems, and has been for over 40 years. The failure model, the huge chunk sized, the single master problems... etc. Nobody who had taken even one decent class would have ever considered the original design viable. They really should just stick to buying their tech pre-made like everything else Google is known for - acquisitions [wikipedia.org]. Other companies are willing to hire experienced people. You know, those old lazy bastards that only work 40 hours a week because they have families, cost way too much to provide health insurance to, but get things done 5x as fast because they have done it before :)
You hit the nail right on the head. The original GFS is pretty lame, as Google folks freely admit (full disclosure: I'm a fomer Googler, but I'm not telling you anything you can't find on ahem Google). The new GFS will also be pretty lame, because as you correctly point out, Larry, Sergey and Eric don't quite get the concept of experienced people who have done it before. All that standard clustering stuff has to be reinvented by Googlers, who frankly, have gotten a little soft over the years, now so used to working. We will see, but I'm predicting that the new GFS will still be a research project two years from now.
Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
It really amuses me how all these different comments come up in every thread about search engines. Everyone's experience is different. Google is still very useful to me 99% of the time. As for AltaVista, I remember '96-'97 very well. I would usually use Yahoo first. If Yahoo only produced a small handful of results--literally, 10 or less, and no good ones--then I'd go to AltaVista and get tens of thousands of results. If I was lucky I'd find what I wanted in the first few pages, else I'd give up.
Google is still literally orders of magnitude than anything else I've tried. Disclaimer: I've pretty much used only Google for the last... um, however many years it's been since they came on the scene. I won't claim to have used it when they were still hosted at stanford.edu, but I heard about them early on (back when they had , probably from Slashdot, and I was impressed right away. I probably stopped using Yahoo altogether within a couple months.