#1737: Datacenter Scale

[Zoom in on a woman with a bun holding her hand palm up in front of her taking to people off-panel right.]

Woman with a bun: 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 the woman with a bun 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 the woman with a bun has turned towards him.]

Hairy: We just replace whole rooms at once. At our scale, messing with racks isn’t economical.

Woman with a bun: 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.