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  • Genx87 - Thursday, December 27, 2007 - link

    The lack of security takes this out of an serious contention for a small or medium size business who can afford this device. The cost takes it out of the contention for business's who are small enough to not care about security as much.

    Having worked for a small business ~30 people. There is no way they would authorize me to spend that kind of cash on a device that indexes our documents. At my current employer which is ~200 people we would have the budget, but the lack of security will put the smackdown on it.

  • bfoster68 - Tuesday, December 25, 2007 - link

    just to clear something up. You don't implement a raided solution as a form of backup. You implement it for fault tolerance so that if a drive fails your system stays up. I don't know what market segment google planned for this appliance but my company would require a fault tolerance solution providing 4 9's uptime.

    my guess is this appliance is for the small business segment and the hardware was designed with this in mind.

    Any solution for a fortune 500 company would require at a minimum dual redundant power supplies and a hardware based, hot swapable raid configuration, Error corrrecting ram and many other features.

    I am not very familiar with this product so please feel free to correct any inaccuracies.

    Just my two cents.

    Bill
  • dblevitan - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link

    Has anyone tried taking out the hard drive, connecting it to another computer, and looking at what's on it? I'm sure it can't be too hard to see what's actually running on the computer.
  • n0nsense - Sunday, December 23, 2007 - link

    You'll probably find Linux based system inside running MySQL and the engine :)

    For the rest, the prescot CPU and 1 HD used because they cost less.
    When you save 100$ on each box, it is 100,000$ for 1000 boxes :)
  • Lizz - Saturday, December 22, 2007 - link

    Getting inside the Mini is probably not impossible, and we considered quite a bunch of methods, simply out of curiosity.

    However, the focus of this review is to give our readers a look at what the Mini actually offers those interested in purchasing one, so we decided not to give it too much focus. :)
  • drothgery - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link

    At least on my employer's Google mini, I found that I could add cookies to the request header.
  • andyleung - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link

    For green purpose, maybe google will do the magic of using AMD Geode or VIA CPU that consumes no more than 5W of power in peak time and still process 250 queries per second. Good job google, I am looking forward to seeing you doing this one day.
  • Taft12 - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link

    Agreed, especially given the light load required for this appliance's purpose. In the meantime, if they must use a chip single-core desktop chip, why not one of the Core 2-based Celerons?

    Great review! I knew it would get bogged down in a hardware discussion though given the audience here.
  • PBMax - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link

    This device is an appliance. It is not a "computer" in the traditional sense of a multipurpose server. I had to fight that idea when my previous company went into the appliance business. When you buy an appliance you buy what it can do and not how it does it. They sell these systems as 50,000 document and 300,000 document systems. So that is the benchmark for performance. As for RAID. This is an entry level system and as such is stripped down. I'm sure the higher end models support RAID. I went to a Google Enterprise seminar and they were talking about search appliances from the Mini to the OneBox and prices ranged from $1500 to over a million. Also I don't think the sysadmin has access to the machine at a level that they can backup anything but the settings. But since this is a search appliance they should be able to restore the box and import their settings and have it reindex their network.
  • HotdogIT - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link

    "In closing, we'd like to thank Peter Griffin of Google, who helped us out a great deal while exploring the Mini's features."

    Peter. Griffin.

    Winnar!
  • GhandiInstinct - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link

    lol
  • legoman666 - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link

    I would have expected this product to be a few years old with hardware like that. A prescott? seriously. And no RAID?
  • razor2025 - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link

    It's a search engine appliance. The product's main focus is in its software algorithm, not how "fast" the hardware itself is. Why would it need RAID? Any sane network/system administrator will have this box backed up in regular interval to the backup array / server. RAID != back up and this product doesn't need the file system performance either.
  • legoman666 - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link

    I didn't comment about the prescott and the lack of RAID based on a performance concern. The precott is hot and inefficient, why not get something that uses less power (IE, a C2D) even if it doesn't need the added processing power of a newer chip? That way, they could market it as a effiecient device or green or whatever.

    As for the RAID, I am not talking about RAID0 (technically that's not even raid), I was leaning more towards RAID1 or RAID5. They mentioned in the review that it took 36 hours to crawl to the 50000 document capcacity, I'm sure most people wouldn't want their search function down for 36 hours while the engine reindexes because it wasn't backed up. Not only that, but you'd probably have to send it back to Google for repairs with only a single drive. With 2 in RAID1, if one dies, a replacement could easily be swapped in.
  • razor2025 - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link

    Maybe it's an option you can request to Google. As for your take on RAID, you're still treating it as Backup. It would be must simpler if they had a second backup google mini instead. Look, they're charging you for the license per document, not how many mini you have hooked up. Also, it's in a 1U form factor. I highly doubt they can manage to squeeze in another drive to satisfy your "RAID!" obsession.
  • Justin Case - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link

    Backups take time to restore from. RAID1 means no downtime. It *is* a backup, and one that's available instantly.

    It doesn't replace regular, preferably _remote_ backups, but it's a pretty basic feature of any system designed to have zero downtime.
  • reginald - Wednesday, January 2, 2008 - link

    RAID and backup are two entirely different things. No RAID in the world can protect you against the same things as backups can (handling errors, programs incorrectly overwriting data, etc). And backups can never replace RAID to achieve continuous availability.

    Thinking you need no backups because you have RAID is like thinking you need no seatbelt because you've got insurance. They simply aren't the same.
  • rudder - Friday, December 21, 2007 - link

    Prescott performance aside... as the article mentioned this is a 24/7 device... why use such a toaster of a cpu when Core2Duos would not add a whole lot to the bottom line?
  • Calvin256 - Tuesday, January 1, 2008 - link

    If you're looking at the prices as a consumer, that may be the case, but you need to rememeber that Google/Gigabyte is not you or I. When purchasing in bulk those processors can be VASTLY cheaper than we could ever hope to pay, even when they're in the bargain bin at shadyetailer.com. Things made for consumers can easily be marked up 200-2000%, things made for OEMs might have a 50-100% margin.

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