September 23, 2016
#1737: Datacenter Scale explain
[Zoom in on Hairbun holding her hand palm up in front of her taking to people off-panel right.]
Hairbun: RAID controllers don’t make sense at our scale; everything is redundant at higher levels. When a drive fails, we just throw away the whole machine.
[In this frame-less panel it is revealed that Hairbun talked to Cueball and Ponytail who is looking her way.]
Cueball: Machine? We throw away whole racks at a time.
Ponytail: Yeah, who replaces one server?
[Hairy has appeared from the left and holds one hand palm up towards the other three where also Hairbun has turned towards him.]
Hairy: We just replace whole rooms at once. At our scale, messing with racks isn’t economical.
Hairbun: Wow.
Cueball: Like Google!
[Megan walks in from the left, and everyone including Hairy now looks towards her. Cueball has taken a hand up to his chin. The replies to Megan are written with clearly smaller font.]
Megan: We don’t have sprinklers or inert gas systems. When a datacenter catches fire, we just rope it off and rebuild one town over.
Hairy: Makes sense.
Cueball: I wonder if the rope is really necessary.