Chiedere all’omino delle pizze

Sul blog What If? di xkcd, Randall Munroe prova a ipotizzare quanti exabytes di dati ha Google fra i vari datacenter sparsi per il mondo:

If we assume that each server has a couple of 2 TB disks attached, we come up with close to 10 exabytes of active storage attached to running clusters. 10 Exabytes. The commercial hard disk industry ships about 8 exabytes worth of drives annually. […]

To make things worse, given the huge number of drives they manage, Google has a hard drive die every few minutes. This isn’t actually all that expensive a problem, in the grand scheme of things—they just get good at replacing drives—but it’s weird to think that when a Googler runs a piece of code, they know that by the time it finishes executing, one of the machines it was running on will probably have suffered a drive failure.