Re: Interesting job ad from HP

In article <04e98bbb-0c6e-4ee4-af3f-1edf28b9139f@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
yyyc186 <yyyc186@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:


I have the impression we must live on different planets.
Again, this is plain nonsense.
I use both, Google and eBay many times per day (and sometimes
even per night). Availability over the past 3 or 4 years: 100%.
May be you should check your ISP.

It only seemed 100% because their outages where during your access
times. They have both reported outages, some regional and some
complete.

Both of these companies are running on "The Swarm Principle". Gangs
of $800 PC's placed on blades and packed into cabinets. The CPU's,
being the same ones you are getting in your desktop machine, fail at
an increased rate due to the addtional usage/heat/power fluctuations.
All transactions and information which was on the blade containing the
CPU from an $800 PC are lost and gone forever. Services losses have
increased in number, but have reduced in size so they don't make CNN,
unless an entire rack goes taking out service to an entire region.


I don't know what eBay is doing - they some well-publicized outages back when
they were on Sun hardware - but Google has their own hardware division and they
roll their own (massive swarm of PC running Linux) hardware, which they're
doing their best to optimize for low heat/power demands. For the core search
business, they're not in any trouble if they lose one of these PCs and the part
of the web it happened to know about; that'll be rebuilt subsequently when
they scan again.

But they have mission-critical can't-lose-a-transaction stuff with the ads that
pay the bills. To bill properly, they need to know what was displayed by who
when, who got click-throughs, etc, etc, and if they can't back it up they don't
get the revenue. Admittedly, they're rolling in cash from the IPO, but the
advertising is their main revenue stream. I don't know how they're tracking
that stuff, but I bet they're not as cavalier about it as about the search
indices.

-- Alan
.

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