[geeks] Fwd: [IP] Interesting speculation on the tech behind gmail

[Mike Meredith]

On Wed, 7 Apr 2004 08:22:46 -0400 (EDT), Sandwich Maker wrote:
> "> The most obvious challenge is the storage. You can't lose people's 
> "> email, and you don't want to ever be down, so data has to be 
> "> replicated. RAID is no good; when a disk fails, a human needs to 
> "> replace the bad disk, or there is risk of data loss if more disks 
> "> fail. One imagines the old ENIAC technician running up and down the
> 
> this is so glibly wrong.

Well except in one bit accidentally ... with a large enough number of
disks you will need someone running around replacing the failed ones on
a full-time basis.

> and with any raid level you can define a hot-spare pool, with afaik no
> limit to the number of disks you put in it.  raid5 for example is thus
> protected against multi-disk failures.

Yes. I've got an old SGI array with no maintenance so it's been equipped
with 5 hot spares.