Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Speculating About Gmail

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the talk-is-cheap dept.

rjelks writes "The Register is running an article about Google's new email service that was mentioned earlier, here. The story details the new privacy concerns about Gmail's privacy policy and Google's tracking habits. The policy states that Google will not guarantee the deletion of emails that are archived even if you cancel your account. 'The contents of your Gmail account also are stored and maintained on Google servers in order to provide the service. Indeed, residual copies of email may remain on our systems, even after you have deleted them from your mailbox or after the termination of your account.'" Reader cpfeifer writes "Rich Skrenta (founder of ODP, and Topix) speculates in his blog that the real product Google is creating isn't web search or email, but a massively scalable, distributed computing platform. 'It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers.' If he's right, the question isn't what product will Google announce next, but what product will they not be able to announce?"

4 of 612 comments (clear)

  1. Very Real by irokitt · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes, it's real. The 1000 MB storage limit is listed at the GMail homepage here.

    If you are ainterested in an account, you can give them you current e-mail here
    and they will send information once GMail goes gold.
    Also note that Firefox and Mozilla support is explicitly mentioned!

    --
    If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
  2. Screenshots! by rffmna · · Score: 5, Informative
    Dear hungry world, here are some Gmail screenshots...

    http://fury.com/article/1990.php

    --
    -------
    FM Clan
  3. Google don't use RAID... by blorg · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...but rather (all this according to the article) their own distributed, fault-tolerant Google Filesystem (GFS) [PDF]. Apparently each of their 1/2 depth 1U servers has only one or two drives. If a server fails (which happens routinely with 100k servers) then it's simply left in place and the data is automatically replicated onto another server from one of the redundant copies.

    1. Re:Google don't use RAID... by ron_ivi · · Score: 5, Informative
      Thanks for the links. I was going to mention the same thing, but didn't find the article as fast as you.

      As the parent pointed out (mod him up), Google's GFS is better than a large raid system in many ways. While a RAID system tolerates the failures of individual disks (which then need to be replaced), Google's GFS _expects_ the failure of most components, including CPUs, memorys, disks, systems, etc -- and in google's case nothing has to be replaced.

      Their system is so fault tollerant, Cringly writes: "Now here is the part that sticks in my mind: the fault tolerant nature of the cluster is such that if a machine fails, the other machines simply take over its functions. As a result, whenever a server fails at Google, THEY DO NOTHING. They don't replace the broken machine. They don't remove the broken machine. They don't even turn it off. In an army of drones, it isn't worth the cost of labor to locate and replace the bad machines. Hundreds, maybe thousands of machines lie dead, uncounted among the 10,000 plus. "

      This is far cooler than any RAID from a fault-tollerance point of view.

      (apparently since then google went to rack-based systems so it probably detects dead ones so they can replace them easily)