In November, Google wrote in their official blog that they had done an experiment where they had sorted 1 PB (1,000 TB) of data with MapReduce. The information about the sorting itself was impressive, but one thing that stuck in our minds was the following (emphasis added by us):

An interesting question came up while running experiments at such a scale: Where do you put 1PB of sorted data? We were writing it to 48,000 hard drives (we did not use the full capacity of these disks, though), and every time we ran our sort, at least one of our disks managed to break (this is not surprising at all given the duration of the test, the number of disks involved, and the expected lifetime of hard disks).

Each of these sorting runs that Google did lasted six hours. So that would mean that hard drives would be breaking at least 4 times a day for every 48,000 hard drives that a data center is using.

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Gmail could be unavailable for more than 21 hours in a day, and Google could still tell you that according to their SLA, the service has had 100% uptime.

It sounds impossible, but it’s a direct consequence of how Google has written its SLA for Google Apps (which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and more). We will explain this in detail further down, but let’s first look at what the SLA actually says.

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The site mytestbox.com has published a interesting article called Cloud computing, grid computing, utility computing – list of top providers.

It contains a good list of companies and information if you are researching cloud services.

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A year ago the term “cloud computing” wasn’t even on the radar. Now it’s everywhere. Microsoft is doing it, Amazon is doing it, IBM is doing it, Google is doing it, Sun is doing it, Apple is doing it, HP is doing it, everyone is doing it. We thought this would be interesting in relation [...]

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