Even Google Struggles To Balance Fast-But-Pricey Flash And Cheap-But-Slow Hard Disks
The Register, Thursday, March 27th, 2025
Reveals it 'dramatically improved IOPS and throughput' of its own storage with homebrew 'L4' automation and cache
Google has revealed that it still relies on hard disk drives for most of its storage needs, but has been able to 'dramatically' improve the performance of its storage systems with a homebrew automated data tiering system.
The ads and search giant admitted its ongoing fondness for spinning rust in a Thursday post that explains the workings of its 'Colossus' universal storage platform.
Colossus underpins YouTube, Gmail, Google's cloud storage services, and other applications.
'Most data centers have one cluster and thus one Colossus filesystem, regardless of how many workloads run inside the cluster,' the post states, before adding 'Many Colossus filesystems have multiple exabytes of storage, including two different filesystems that have in excess of 10 exabytes of storage each.'