Behind the scenes at the Internet Archive

rajbot — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 07:19:46 +0000

When you are building a digital library to provide Universal Access to Human Knowledge, how to you hold all the data?

You start with a few racks of machines to hold the data using redundant storage:

The red boxes are built by Capricorn. Each one is a 1U half-depth low-power server that can hold four 1TB hard drives:

Add a bunch of homemade routers:

And some BigIron: (this thing pushed 6Gb/s today!)

Now you need to power it up:

And cool it down:

And fill it with books:

For some reason, you need a 1980′s-era Connection Machine:

Finally, no Archive is complete without a world-class Linux kernel hacker:

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