> I don't understand why you somehow think one needs to actually work for
> British Airways, Siemens, Yamaha or IBM to be able to imagine what's
> it's like to work in a company with 100,000+ employees.

It's like the thing with Google's data centre. A "computer" is a 
low-power device. Unless you've ever worked with thousands of them at 
once, it just doesn't occur to you what there might be power supply or 
cooling issues to overcome.

I imagine the reverse also applies; somebody who works for Google would 
probably think that the solution to "our tape drive just died" is "so go 
buy a new one". They probably wouldn't even realise that to a small 
company, £3,000 for a new tape drive is actually /a crapload of money/. 
It probably wouldn't even occur to them.

In short, you don't really understand what it's like to work within a 
given set of constraints unless, you know, you've had to work within 
that set of constraints...

>> Francois Labreque wrote:
>> > We've also had the performance discussion before. Yes, the
>> > theoretical access speed of a local SATA drive is much faster than
>> > that of a SAN attached logical disk, but in actual real world
>> > practice, with real world data, there's not much of a difference,
>> > even on SANs located halfway across town in another building.
>
> "In another building" DOES NOT mean "over the Internet". Private data
> circuits predate the internet, and no company would use the Internet to
> link two data centres together.

How is that even *possible*? It's not like you can just go to the 
hardware store and buy 25km of copper wire and then put it into the 
ground with a shovel on your day off or something...

>>> Not that SANs are infaillible, but why do you assume that it will fail?
>>
>> They want to back up 200GB of data per day over a 5 Mbit/sec Internet
>> connection. You do the math.
>
> So their backup strategy will fail. Not the actual SAN. Gotcha.

Well, given that backup is what this SAN is *for*, I guess I mixed up 
the two things.

>> Plus, since when does rolling out a brand new complex system go
>> smoothly? ;-)
>
> When it's planned properly. I've seen it happen. But, I must admit, that
> I've seen quite a few disasters, too.

Given the company that *I* work for, would you expect a smooth rollout? ;-)

>> So you're saying that more than "a handful" of telco companies exist?
>
> There are, in fact, more than a handful of telcos in most countries.
> while the actual wires underground usually belong to one or two
> companies, the other ones will buy bandwidth from the
> cable-owning-entity and resell it to other corporations. This is why,
> for example, I can rent circuits from BT in Canada, even though they do
> not own any of the fibre optics here.
>
> But this has nothing to do with the fact that I was talking about
> businesses buying telecommunications services from the telcos, not the
> telcos themselves. Last time I checked HSBC was not a telco, and I do
> know that they've had 10Gbps links between their data centres for over
> 10 years.

OK, so a major /bank/ can also accord crazy technology. None of this 
alters the fact that the next tiny company I end up working for won't be 
able to afford this kind of thing.

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