What Storage Technology Gmail Using? a discussion....

[shahidiimran 0]

well, you must have been aware of gmail service offered by google, they are giving 2GB's to its users, aren't you stunned that how they can manage such a big storage, beause it become popular very sooon and now it have millions of user world wide, so which data storage technology they are using, if the answer is traditional storage technology then i think this is not the answer as our magnetic storage technology is not that efficient and slow too and handling trillions of GBs in free is.....what can i say now?i think they are using HOLOGRAHIC data storage, holographic data Storage technology is the storage of data in the all volume of material rather than just at surface, as out magnetic storage technology is storing data at surface only so they are bigger in size.you can learn more about the holographic technology by visting IBM website, a resarch paper about the holographic data storage technology is placed there, download that and read and if anyone have information that what data storage technology gmail is using then please reply to this topic, we will discuss about that, i am asking this question and starting this topic because i am un-aware of the fact that gmail seems fearless about the storage, they are just giving users alot space, if they are using magnetic storage than there must be some limits to it, az magnetic storage of such a large data and searchin Trillions of data to respond to only one user and that much fast, i am really impressed, i know searching is the main field of gmail team regarding google , but...anyways if some one have any info about that, reply to this topic and meanwhile i will search about the gmail technology......cheers up and use google's gmail

[spacewaste1405241471 0]

Hmmm, I thought the same thing when I found out about the 2gb give away...But then I didn't really think of doing the holographic thing seing as it might be more expensive, and how I had just heard of it now.I guessed that they probably use terabytes....And probably have 100-1000 about....which gives about 100000000-100000000mb'sAnd they probably use gzip compression.Since they probably have a lot of servers that will help to....Which helps with their indexing and with their caching system.Just my guess though.

[VisionGraffix 0]

Google uses networked storage but in the form of networked clusters of Linux servers, which are cheap x86 servers with one or two internal drives.A cluster will consist of several hundred, even thousands of machines, each with their internal disk. At the last Google public count, in April 2003, there were 15,000 plus such machines with 80GB drives. Lets say 16,000 machines with 1.5 disk drives, 120MB, per machine. That totals up to 1.84TB. In fact Google probably has between two and five petabytes altogether, if we add in duplicated systems, test systems and news systems and Froogle systems and so forth.VG

[musichere 0]

My guess is that they bought a ridiculous amount of servers, and they are using high comperssion to store all our text based emails (notice how they don't allow you to use pictures inside your emails)

[MajesticTreeFrog 0]

Actually, they do allow you to use pictures in you email.As for how they do it, realize that only a very very small percentage of users actually takes up the 1gig, much less the two. 1 or 2 gigs for email is more or less infinite space given typical usage. So, google only HAS to have some smaller percentage of that space available, plus say 50% overhead just in case. Also, hard drive and storage costs have fallen like crazy the last few years. For a corp the size of google, while its still expensive I am sure, its still not THAT expensive to provide this space.

[chrls1405241492 0]

I think that is a "Monster Storage Technology" ....

[PureEvil 0]

Holographic storage wouldn't be probable in google's case, at least with my experience of it, however, it is going to be released to the public soon with 300gig discs, the problem with holographic storage, is it is just that, storage, much like a dvd or such medium, at least most of it it, so you have to go and get regular old HD's to serve something like that, with google's stock at umm like $463.63 todays close, thats for ONE share, one could easily see how it would be possible for them to have slave farms of servers, most larger places, like hotmail and yahoo are giving at least one gig to their users and there is another site 30gig.com that offers 30gig of email storage, (invite only), and THATS huge LOL, I mean, hey for $60 one can buy a 80gig harddrive, thats not even OEM, thats 40users, well for per stock share, you have around eight harddrives, thats 240 users, with only one share... imagine with a couple hundred thousand shares could do, I mean a thousand shares supports at least a quarter million ppl, thats with them filling there space. What if they use just dynamically sized partitions, much in the lore days of redhat, or with VMWare, make a single file that acts like a filesystem, and expands to a limit of 2gigs, much less space needed, more space needed? give the admins a warning to feed the machine, and more space is created... boom follow the KISS method.... may prove valuable.

[poy 0]

I've always wondered about the space but after reading this google seems to be one very hardcore company. Can you imagine the bill they pay to have all those systems running?

[kaputnik 0]

My take is that - since a majority of computer users - at some point graviate towards purchasing their own computer or laptop, it becomes easier for them to access e-mail through POP with a client like Outlook or Thunderbird. Now, since a large chunk of users are already utilizing the POP access to their g-mail accounts, a lot of them may not be archiving their e-mails on the gmail servers. If this is the case then Gmail woud be handling only a few hundred TB of data at any given point of time. However, all mail content including attachments would require to be compressed and stored in servers that are dedicated to 'old' mail - stuff that folks would usually forget about in time. Now, if a text outline of all the e-mail content is extracted and dumped into a text file; utilizing a key-work technology that associates the location of each word appearing in the text file, you'd have a relatively simple way to get to the e-mails once they are searched for. But, if all e-mails passing through Gmail servers are actually being stored infefinately, then other than the fact that there is going to be a huge demand for cheap and efficient storege; there would also be the bemand for indestructable storage. Quantum computing and quantum storage was being researched into as early as 1956 by one of the co-makers of the first atomic weapon - a man named Richard Fynmann. Now, looking at the pace at which hardware research develops into actual functional products; my personal opinion would be that Google has somehow managed to develop/purchase the technology to harness the power of quantum computing. This would result in blistering speeds where processing and computing speeds are concerned and nearly infinate storage.

[Pina 0]

In my ideia Google gives you virtual space. In really they give all the space you want with a maximum of 2GB but the space is not reserved to you in Google's servers you know.If you use 200Mb the rest of your 2GB will be use by other users. When you need Google gives you the space yu want. But off course they have a lot, but a lot of servers.

[BitShift 0]

I think it is virtual space also because on the main Gmail page it says "2.5 gig and counting" or wutever and you see the number slowly going up.This just seems like me as an advertising stunt in which they will allow a user to have an allocation that large but i seriously doubt they have that space already reserved for you on some random hard driveThe number of gmail users has to be growing exponentially, with the way the invite works, after some thought you can see why they do invites instead of open registrationopen regitration would include so many new users they wouldnt be able to keep up, but through invites the pace is a little more steady

[kaputnik 0]

This just seems like me as an advertising stunt in which they will allow a user to have an allocation that large but i seriously doubt they have that space already reserved for you on some random hard drive

Virtual or not, I do think Google does have the funds to invest in massive amounts of storage. More importantly, I do think that Google has the funds to put into R&D into developing cutting edge quantum computing and quantum information storage (as a much more future proof technology). Resources of course should hardly be much of a problem seeing that Google's Fy'05 results post $1.46 billion in NET earnings; playing around with that kind of a war chest has got to put Google on the path to getting the best in areas it focusses on.