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Re:Apple confirms it uses Google cloud for some of iCloud by discodave on Monday February 26, 2018 @12:33PM (#16467096)
Power consumption is probably not a good proximate for disk capacity. Dense disk capacity has way lower power per rack than compute. Unless you know the overall compute/storage ratio, very hard to figure out storage capacity. The reverse might work if compute power consumption overwhelms storage power consumption. On the other hand, it might be easier to infer storage than comoute from rack positions, or square feet of dc space. Only so many spinning disks per cubic meter.

Also, there's a Reinvent talk from several years ago with "8 exabytes" in the title, so surely Google and Amazon both have many exabytes by this point.

Re:Apple confirms it uses Google cloud for some of iCloud by puzzle on Monday February 26, 2018 @01:09PM (#16467460)
You can make educated guesses about which range the compute/storage ratio is in if you look at e.g. public information from talks like

http://www.pdsw.org/pdsw-discs17/slides/PDSW-DISCS-Google-Ke...

(it has other useful information that might not have been mentioned anywhere before, like the crazy Colossus on Colossus... or D, the GFS chunkserver replacement)

You can use that to revisit Randall Munroe's estimates: https://what-if.xkcd.com/63/ You can infer from some of the comments that e.g. very dense disk capacity is not a good idea. There's more, of course, but I can't go into details (ex-Googler).

Re:Apple confirms it uses Google cloud for some of iCloud by xapata on Monday February 26, 2018 @10:24PM (#16470861)
> many exabytes

Like, a hellabyte?

I'm still trying to make hella- happen as an SI prefix.