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The place I heard first not doing drive swaps was Google. I also heard that they didn't use RAID, but rather relied on data just being replicated over 3 separa
by regularfry 14y ago
The place I heard first not doing drive swaps was Google. I also heard that they didn't use RAID, but rather relied on data just being replicated over 3 separate machines. Both of these may have been apocryphal. I'm sure someone around here can correct me if so :-)
- EwanToo 14y agoGoogle (and others like AWS) don't use RAID, that's absolutely right - but they also don't use arrays from the regular manufacturers like EMC, NetApp, etc. Whether they eventually get around to swapping out failed drives or not, I don't know. I assume they do, since a CPU and memory costs a lot more than a drive replacement, so you want to keep them up and running.
- TillE 14y agoI imagine they'd swap out the whole blade as a quick fix, but then have it diagnosed, repaired, and put back into service. Makes more sense than trying to fiddle around with a defective server while it's still in the rack.
- justincormack 14y agoI first came across them in IBM's ice cube project around 2002 http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4165609/IBM-stacks-hard-disk-bricks-to-build-dense-storage-cube http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4165609/IBM-stacks-h... which was later spun out into a startup and then canned. I think this was before the Google fail in place stuff. Because it was a 3d mesh you actually couldn't get to the hardware to replace it. They had blocks of 12 drives to offset some of the drive to CPU cost issues. There are a bunch of papers on it if you dig around and its still an interesting model I think.
- bcoates 14y agoRight, that's the kind of system I was thinking of: Not off the shelf enterprise RAID enclosures, but big piles of commodity drives run by companies that do storage as their business, like Google and Backblaze and Facebook.