LISNews: Librarian Blog Since 1999

Over at Hangingtogether, Roy has posted In the Hall of the Mountain King, an inside tour of the OCLC computing and monitoring facilities. It includes a ten Petabyte tape backup, 180 Terabytes of disks, the WorldCat servers, and the infrastructure supporting Open WorldCat. "Taking a lesson from Google, this set of processors running in parallel is capable of providing millisecond response times by dividing up the index across multiple nodes and merging the results. Using commodity hardware from Dell and open source system software (SUSE Linux), OCLC is working at reducing infrastructure costs while maximizing performance."