ZDNet has revealed Google's biggest technical achievement.

PCs crash, and Google deals with it.

Martin LaMonica got this from Urs Hoelzle, a vice president of engineering and of operations during the recent EclipseCon.

A key is its Google File System, designed to assume that a failure can happen at any time. Thus data is replicated in three places, and there is a "master" machine that can locate copies.

Here's the money quote. "If you can expect failures, then this is what makes cheap commodity PCs viable for Internet services."

Thus, Linux' biggest success story runs on proprietary software. Ironic, huh?