Re:Google: 'At scale, everything breaks'
by dholowiski on Thursday June 23, 2011 @03:37PM
(#2689488)
BFT... big freaking tapes.
I wonder if it's really tape though. You can get 'tape' backup systems where the cartrige looks just like a tape, but it's actually a special hard drive. I wouldn't be surprised if that's it.
Otherwise, I wonder how many miles (of tape) long my gmail inbox is?
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Urs wouldn't have said tape if he didn't mean tape.
This brings to mind an amusing anecdote. I once saw a conversation about how many miles of tape are storing Viagra ads. Someone quipped, "The only thing that I know for certain is that the trend is up."
Re:Google: 'At scale, everything breaks'
by whatusername on Thursday June 23, 2011 @10:22PM
(#2690701)
Likely a lot less than 1 mile.
LTO5 stores approximately 3 TB with Compression. (1.5 Native). It is 846m long.
Let us assume you have 7597MB of emails in your gmail inbox. That's about .48% of the capacity of a Uncompressed tape. So that's a smidge over 4m. And if google compresses their data -- then you're potentially looking about 2m.
According to one source I found[1], 60 meters of DAT tape holds 1300mb of data. That's 21.67mb per meter. My gmail inbox is 679mb, thats about 31 meters of DAT tape.
[1] http://menehune.opt.wfu.edu/Kokua/SGI/007-2861-005/sgi_html/...
Re:Google: 'At scale, everything breaks'
by whatusername on Thursday June 23, 2011 @10:24PM
(#2690705)
LTO5 hit's about 1.8GB per metre. Or about 3.6GB compressed.[1]
There's a reason that people say tape is still cost effective -- and it's not DAT.