This is an interesting (albeit technical) article on the structure of G's hardware and software interconnects.

To deal with the more than 10 billion Web pages and tens of terabytes of information on Google's servers, the company combines cheap machines with plenty of redundancy, Hoelzle said. Its commodity servers cost around $1,000 apiece, and Google's architecture places them into interconnected nodes.

http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/3487041

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