Google designing upgrade to Google File System

A replacement for its vaunted Google File System (GFS) is underway at Google, even as the distributed, custom-designed file system strains under workloads it was never designed or envisioned to support.

GFS tech leader Sean Quinlan observed that "[GFS's] staying power has been nothing short of remarkable given that Google's operations have scaled orders of magnitude beyond anything the system had been designed to handle."

Of course, who could have imagined some of the applications such as YouTube and Gmail back when GFS was first designed to power the Google search engine? In the meantime, engineers at Google have been working over the past two years to tackle some of the problems that GFS faced, according to Quinlan. He believes these improvements will put the original to shame.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at The Register

Related Articles:
Google to begin opening up Google Wave for testing
Enterprise search grows in importance
Google unveils Chrome cloud synchronization plans