Posted in
Main on December 12th, 2008 by Pingdom
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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Posted in
Main on December 2nd, 2008 by Pingdom
Sooner or later all websites run into trouble (even Google) or have to perform maintenance that takes them offline. However, there is a big difference between how different websites handle the resulting error or maintenance pages that will have to be shown to the user. Some lighten the mood with jokes, some are dry and to the point, and some drop the ball completely.
We make our living here at Pingdom by monitoring websites for problems, so we tend to stumble across more of these error pages than most people do. This post includes error and maintenance pages for 24 of the most popular Web 2.0 services out there. While two of them can definitely be considered examples of what NOT to do, the other 22 are here to give you plenty of inspiration and hopefully put a smile on your face.
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Posted in
Outages on September 24th, 2008 by Pingdom
On Monday, September 29, starting at 12:01 a.m. PST Microsoft will take Xbox Live offline for maintenance for up to 24 hours. The maintenance will affect Xbox Live and some parts of the xbox.com website.
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Posted in
Pingdom on October 2nd, 2007 by Pingdom
(To be honest, we added this feature almost a month ago, but here is a proper introduction.) Sometimes you may want to temporarily pause monitoring of some of your websites or servers, or you may want an easy way to temporarily disable alerts to one or several of your contact persons (or all of them!). [...]
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Posted in
Main on April 27th, 2007 by Pingdom
One of the best things about the web is that it’s global, but this can also be a great challenge for webmasters. When you want to do maintenance on your website, you have to keep in mind that it’s always daytime somewhere. As the saying goes, the web never sleeps. Let’s take an example. 2 [...]
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Posted in
Main on February 23rd, 2007 by Pingdom
When your website goes down, whether it’s for planned or unplanned (read: panicky) maintenance, you definitely want to have some kind of temporary landing page. If visitors are just met by a browser error message that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. A company that has repeatedly provided everyone with great, and very amusing, maintenance pages is [...]
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