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

[Brian Dunbar]

On Apr 7, 2004, at 12:22 PM, Sandwich Maker wrote:

> "From: Mike Meredith <mike at blackhairy.demon.co.uk>
> "
> "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.
>
> yeah, but -- with 100k cpu boards, they must have someone running
> around replacing failures already.

CPU board failures happen less often than hard drive failures .. no?  
One imagines there would be less running around.

~brian