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Doofus brings us a CNet story about a discussion from Google's Jeff Dean spotlighting some of the inner workings of the search giant's massive data centers. Quoting: "'Our view is it's better to have twice as much hardware that's not as reliable than half as much that's more reliable,' Dean said. 'You have to provide reliability on a software level. If you're running 10,000 machines, something is going to die every day.' Bringing a new cluster online shows just how fallible hardware is, Dean said. In each cluster's first year, it's typical that 1,000 individual machine failures will occur; thousands of hard drive failures will occur; one power distribution unit will fail, bringing down 500 to 1,000 machines for about 6 hours; 20 racks will fail, each time causing 40 to 80 machines to vanish from the network; 5 racks will "go wonky," with half their network packets missing in action; and the cluster will have to be rewired once, affecting 5 percent of the machines at any given moment over a 2-day span, Dean said. And there's about a 50 percent chance that the cluster will overheat, taking down most of the servers in less than 5 minutes and taking 1 to 2 days to recover."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Sites' ease-of-use, tight integration with Google services strengthens company's position in Web-app race

Google today unveiled a powerful new weapon in its arsenal of lightweight Web-based productivity applications: a tool for easily and collaboratively creating and editing Web sites. Dubbed Google Sites, it's built around JotSpot, the wiki platform that Google acquired in October of 2006 -- and whose previously unclear fate has been cause for quite a bit of hand-wringing.

The search behemoth appears to have a broad range of applications in mind for the freely available tool, from building a private company intranet, accessible and customizable by users on a permissions basis, to developing a public-facing Web site for all the world to see.

Google has aimed to make the Google Sites easy enough for a beginner yet feature-rich enough for a power user. For example, building a Google Site requires no HTML, according to the company: It's "as easy as editing a document," the company says. There's also a "growing list" of page templates to get users started, including "Web page, announcements, file cabinet, dashboard, and list," according to Google.

At the same time, Google Sites lets page creators easily insert content such as videos, docs, spreadsheets, presentations, photo slide shows, and calendars -- thanks in part to its integration with other Google apps and offering.

Ah yes, Google's collection of shining Web gems: Google Docs, Google Calendar, YouTube, and Picasa. By integrating Google Sites with those aforementioned services, Google boosts the value of the entire array significantly. "This is a key last hole in the Google Apps suite," Matt Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise, told CNET. "It is the nucleus for other pieces to fit into for online collaboration."

Moreover, the unveiling of Google Sites further fortifies Google's enviable position in the increasingly important Web services space -- a point that Microsoft clearly can't ignore. (I say that as someone who buys into the theory that Redmond's bid for Yahoo had a lot to do with having an eye on extending its own Web-app reach.)

More information is available at the Google Sites home page.

An anonymous reader writes "Google is reportedly looking into investing in or buying a company called Space Data, which provides wireless voice and data services to remote areas with a fleet of weather balloons fitted with transceivers." My mind is sorta tripping over how something like this could work, but I gotta admit that the idea is really cool.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Beat to the offline punch enabled by its own Google Gears technology, Google appears on the verge of leveraging Gears to enable users of its Google Apps online productivity suite to work on documents and spreadsheets while not connected to the Net.

Ever illuminating the guts of the search giant's wares, Tony Ruscoe of Google Blogoscoped stumbled across experimental offline access to Docs while "playing around with one of Google's not-so-private experimental sites."

Although Ruscoe was able to rename and star documents while offline, the crown jewel of the proposed functionality, being able to actually view and edit documents, lays in wait. This functionality is an essential component to any serious push to unseat Microsoft Office as king of productivity in the enterprise.

Even when the functionality is present, however, a lack of business-grade service-level agreements and increasing security concerns will remain significant impediments to widespread Google Apps enterprise adoption.

Gears, the technology that will eventually fuel Google Apps' future offline capabilities, was first put to use by Google Apps competitor Zoho, a move Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering at Google, cheered as a victory for the Web as a platform, and thus for Google itself.

Google has implemented Gears into its Google Reader, the synching capabilities of which are reminiscent of what Ruscoe uncovered in this experimental Docs iteration, as he points out.

In other recent Blogoscoped sightings of highly anticipated Google functionality, Ruscoe uncovered a Google Sites-related icon in a stylesheet, suggesting Google's proposed integration of Wiki capabilities obtained in its now long-ago purchase of JotSpot may also be around the corner.

Additional resources
Thin vs. Fat: Google’s plan to kill Microsoft Office
Google security under fire
Google revs up security play