That makes sense. But what will hurt them if google does not disclose any performance metrics, e.g. request/second, disk seek/second, but only the detail hardware configuration and failure model.
Google has published some data on disk failure in the past. The published another paper on failures in storage system in the coming OSDI 10[1]. Funny!
If google disclosed their hardware configuration in data center, I suspect a lot of other small companies will hurry to the vendor and subscribe the same components. Looks like a good deal for these hardware vendors.
But I do no see any vendor label their product as "Google is using it".
Rackable Systems is the company that supplies servers to a lot of the other top sites (disclaimer: no personal connection to Rackable Systems.) Most smaller companies just buy 1U servers and hire a good network admin to string 'em all together. (former managed hosting company CEO)
Hard disks are getting close to the limit of perpendicular recording and will have to adopt HAMR or BPM. At least the disk vendors are used to big technology changes; AFAIK flash has been using the same floating gate cell all along.
If you're asking about the bandwidth incurred by burnbit.com, no. They're just acting as a public bittorrent tracker, which does nothing other than tell its clients to connect to other people. Bandwidth consumption is trivial for a tracker.
But burnbit.com has to download the file and computes the hash signature to build the torrent file, if the URL hasn't been submitted by somebody else before. Did I miss anything here?
Google has published some data on disk failure in the past. The published another paper on failures in storage system in the coming OSDI 10[1]. Funny!
[1]http://www.usenix.org/events/osdi10/tech/techAbstracts.html#...