Last month, Google’s VP of Infrastructure made an unusual request to computer hardware manufacturers: build hard drives that are less reliable. It seems silly — why would Google want its data centers to use drives that are more likely to lose data? The answer is simple: Thanks to a radical rethinking in how data centers are built, tech companies like Google don’t need a reliable hard drive, as much as they need lots of cheap, high-capacity ones. After all, with Google’s massive reach, the data is copied all over the globe anyway. “ already have to have that data somewhere else anyway,” writes Google’s Eric Brewer![]()
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