On 2/2/2012 7:05, Invisible wrote:
> £3,000 for a new tape drive is actually /a crapload of money/. It 
probably

When I first started at Bellcore, I joined during the budgeting time of 
year. My manager asked "Do you foresee needing any equipment for your wor
k?" 
I said "Well, I'll need a desktop computer of course." He says "No, I mea
n 
equipment. Anything over $50K? If so, we need to budget it." :-)

That said, google does everything with such redundancy that it's not a 
question of spending $3K to buy a tape drive, but a question of how many 
$3K 
tape drives you need to buy to back up 3 petabytes/day of data[*] and how
 
long are those drives going to last before you need to replace them, 
factoring the salaries of the guys doing the fixing and the writing of th
e 
code to allocate tapes to data.  ([*] All numbers ass-pulled, mind.)

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

That's exactly what the companies that do this for a living do.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   People tell me I am the counter-example.

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