a brief description doesnt begin to describe this system that google built but the way google has managed the millions of gigabytes that it stores has inspired a range of other software projects such as the open source hadoop which is specifically used to handle enormous millions of gb sets of data companies who need to process such volumes of data such as pharma companies doing drug research can use amazon to store all that data and hadoop to process it hadoop is just one element of the continuing revolution in data management just as gdrive and dropbox and others represent the consumer side expect more radical innovations and more tricky questions