Apparently, watching Google is now as much sport as watching the NSA, according to the latest in Baseline Magazine. Discovering the way Google solves data-related problems may be more interesting because Google, unlike the NSA, is not encumbered by government contracting procedures and regulations.
Think about it: you can search the web with Google and find files faster than you can when you're looking for files on your own computer using Windows Search. To learn why it takes longer to search a hard disk on your own *#$% computer than the web, read the Baseline story.
The National Security Agency and Google are in the same business, essentially: take a firehose spitting out information and sort it into something useful. Both the NSA and Google keep their collective mouths shut about sources and methods. The NSA has been slightly better about keeping purchases of high bandwidth out of the news, but only because they have an organization advantage of operating outside the traditional business community (assuming Watkins-Johnson is not a normal business).
The Baseline story estimates the number of Google servers at somewhere around 450,000, but you should think of them as a much smaller number of MPP supercomputers. Google initially had trouble because most data centers couldn't deliver enough watts per square foot to power dense server blade environments, so they turned to AMD processors. That's a process of scaling up computing power, and I wonder how the NSA solved the same problem, although I assume they just pumped in more watts for processors and cooling. Those of you familiar with Microsoft's current file system, NTFS, may know that you can set disk cluster size from 4 kbytes to 64 kbytes. Google's file system has a cluster size of 64 Mbytes. Their files are large, and a large cluster size leads to more efficiency. Google has re-engineered kernel, filesystems, and who knows what else for scalability. Did they re-engineer from the ground up more efficiently than the NSA?
Another facet of the Baseline Google story is the office-in-a-box. As a former IT contractor for political campaigns, I had to figure out the cheapest fastest way to set up a computing infrastructure for a field office in, say, Des Moines, Manchester, or Columbia. (Columbia is the capital of South Carolina, for those of you out of the primary calendar loop.) My setup was fairly simple: router, firewall, server (Domain Controller also running DHCP, DNS, and a Global Catalog, of course), printer/copier.
Google has office IT-in-a-box that would put mine to shame. Google also has shipping containers converted into server infrastructures that they can ship anywhere. Baseline implies that the military's IT- infrastructures-in-a-shipping-container exist in Powerpoint only.
As far as the Google vs. NSA operating efficiency battle goes, at least there's more than one career option for deep geeks. I would have a hard time deciding between the two because they both offer serious computing power. As far as ethical considerations go, both have pluses and minuses. The NSA doesn't make money selling advertising; as hard as Google tries, running a business requires some level of compromise to make money. The power of both organizations could be abused. The way things are going in the Intelligence Community, Google will be more secret than the NSA in five years.
What do you think?
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