Although IBM had a phrase ' Solutions for a Small Planet", Google was one of the companies which was destined to address a truly " planetary scale challenge".
In their pursuit of creating a planetary scale web search service, Google developed a massively parallel and fault tolerant distributed file system (GFS) along with a data organization ( BigTable) and a programming paradigm (MapReduce) that is drastically different from the traditional relational model.
This "Managing Data in the cloud" approach is particularly suitable for large volume, massively parallel text processing and possibly for analytics.
The public cloud offerings from Google- Gmail, GAE, Blogger and more are available to users as part of this cloud platforms developed.
