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We believe the data to be extremely DURABLE (survive), but if your strategy is to "host content" in a highly available fashion where people will die if your con

We believe the data to be extremely DURABLE (survive), but if your strategy is to "host content" in a highly available fashion where people will die if your content is offline for an hour, we recommend you use two different providers with some sort of fail over Do your durability metrics take datacenter failure or human error into account? Datacenter failures are rare, but they do happen and can cause data loss if all of your data is in that data center. Likewise, human error can cause cascading failures across a datacenter (or beyond) if there are no firewalls between zones that prevent a single person/command/software update from affecting all copies of the data.

manigandham 8y ago
That depends on what you mean by failure. Are you talking about a data center failing because every single machine inside blew up? Otherwise the common failures like DC power outage or network drops are about availability rather than durability. The data is stills safe on multiple drives.
- Johnny555 8y ago
  I'm talking about the kind of failure that hit a Microsoft Azure data center: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/microsoft/azure-outage-proves-hard-way-availability-zones-are-good-idea https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/microsoft/azure-outage-p... “ but in this instance, temperatures increased so quickly in parts of the data center that some hardware was damaged before it could shut down" ... "A significant number of storage servers were damaged, as well as a small number of network devices and power units.”
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Yea if that damaged all the storage servers containing your data then there would be data loss.
    - Johnny555 8y ago
      That's why I asked if that 99.999999999% durability number includes datacenter loss. It's an unlikely failure mode but is it .00000000001% unlikely? I don't know. Given the fact that Azure lost a datacenter with this failure mode, I don't think it's in the "likelihood of an asteroid destroying Earth within a million years" ballpark. Their durability page doesn't really clear it up, they say "Because at these probability levels, it’s far more likely that ... Earthquakes / floods / pests / or other events" known as “Acts of God” destroy multiple data centers". But from the post above: "any one file (or piece of file) is in exactly one datacenter." So it doesn't take multiple datacenter failures to lose data, just one unless you explicitly copy your data to multiple datacenters.
  - hinkley 8y ago
    If a lightning strike is close enough the surge protector won’t save your equipment. When I read the overview of this I expected a roomful of fried servers, not an orderly shutdown triggered by a cooling failure.

manigandham 8y ago

That depends on what you mean by failure. Are you talking about a data center failing because every single machine inside blew up? Otherwise the common failures like DC power outage or network drops are about availability rather than durability. The data is stills safe on multiple drives.

Johnny555 8y ago
I'm talking about the kind of failure that hit a Microsoft Azure data center: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/microsoft/azure-outage-proves-hard-way-availability-zones-are-good-idea https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/microsoft/azure-outage-p... “ but in this instance, temperatures increased so quickly in parts of the data center that some hardware was damaged before it could shut down" ... "A significant number of storage servers were damaged, as well as a small number of network devices and power units.”
- manigandham 8y ago
  Yea if that damaged all the storage servers containing your data then there would be data loss.
  - Johnny555 8y ago
    That's why I asked if that 99.999999999% durability number includes datacenter loss. It's an unlikely failure mode but is it .00000000001% unlikely? I don't know. Given the fact that Azure lost a datacenter with this failure mode, I don't think it's in the "likelihood of an asteroid destroying Earth within a million years" ballpark. Their durability page doesn't really clear it up, they say "Because at these probability levels, it’s far more likely that ... Earthquakes / floods / pests / or other events" known as “Acts of God” destroy multiple data centers". But from the post above: "any one file (or piece of file) is in exactly one datacenter." So it doesn't take multiple datacenter failures to lose data, just one unless you explicitly copy your data to multiple datacenters.
- hinkley 8y ago
  If a lightning strike is close enough the surge protector won’t save your equipment. When I read the overview of this I expected a roomful of fried servers, not an orderly shutdown triggered by a cooling failure.