The Great Disk Drive in the Sky: How Web giants store big—and we mean big—data

The Great Disk Drive in the Sky: How Web giants store big—and we mean big—data: #web #technology #bigdata #cloud #icloud Consider the tech it takes to back the search box on Google's home page: behind the algorithms, the cached search terms, and the other features that spring to life as you type in a query sits a data store that essentially contains a full-text snapshot of most of the Web. While you and thousands of other people are simultaneously submitting searches, that snapshot is constantly being updated with a firehose of changes. At the same time, the data is being processed by thousands of individual server processes, each doing everything from figuring out which contextual ads you will be served to determining in what order to cough up search results.