They have come a very long way since the late 1990s when I was working there as a sysadmin and the data center was a couple of racks plus a tape robot in a back room of the Presidio office with an alarmingly slanted floor. The tape robot vendor had to come out and recalibrate the tape drives more often than I might have wanted.

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textfiles 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There is a fundamental resistance to tape technology that exists to this day as a result of all those troubles.

	▲	EvanAnderson 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's sad, but it mirrors my experience with commercial customers. Tape is so fiddly but the cost efficiency for large amounts of data and at-rest stability is so good. Tape is caught in a spiral of decreasing market share so industry has no incentive to optimize it. Edit: Then again, I recently heard a podcast that talked about the relatively good at-rest stability of SATA hard disk drives stored outdoors. >smile<

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hinkley 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We had a little server room where the AC was mounted directly over the rack. I don't think we ever put an umbrella in there but it sure made everyone nervous the drain pipe would clog.

Much more recently, I worked at a medium-large SaaS company but if you listened to my coworkers you'd think we were Google (there is a point where optimism starts being delusion, and a couple of my coworkers were past it.)

Then one day I found the telemetry pages for Wikipedia. I am hoping some of those charts were per hour not per second, otherwise they are dealing with mind numbing amounts of traffic.