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Most data isn’t “big,” and businesses are wasting money pretending it is
by thundara

    But it appears that for both Facebook and Yahoo, those same clusters are unnecessary for many of the tasks which they’re handed. In the case of Facebook, most of the jobs engineers ask their clusters to perform are in the “megabyte to gigabyte” range (pdf), which means they could easily be handled on a single computer—even a laptop.

    The story is similar at Yahoo, where it appears the median task size handed to Yahoo’s cluster is 12.5 gigabytes. (pdf) That’s bigger than what the average desktop PC could handle, but it’s no problem for a single powerful server.