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how can yahoo/gmail/hotmail offer over 100mb per user?

A

andylawcc

Lifer
or they just bought a whole bunch of these?

i mean, if MSN is offering 250mb per account, and there's like gazillion hotmail users out there, so MSN has like a 250xgazillon megabytes harddrive in their server?
 
First off, they are probably using SCSI drives in RAID. Second, they don't have enough space by a long shot to cover 1gb of space for every user. They figure that at 100mb of crap or so most users are going to clean it out.
 
Originally posted by: DaiShan
First off, they are probably using SCSI drives in RAID. Second, they don't have enough space by a long shot to cover 1gb of space for every user. They figure that at 100mb of crap or so most users are going to clean it out.
Click to expand...

Google has always used standard IDE hard drives. Same for yahoo and hotmail on their email clusters I think.
 
Originally posted by: Sifl
Originally posted by: DaiShan
First off, they are probably using SCSI drives in RAID. Second, they don't have enough space by a long shot to cover 1gb of space for every user. They figure that at 100mb of crap or so most users are going to clean it out.
Click to expand...

Google has always used standard IDE hard drives. Same for yahoo and hotmail on their email clusters I think.
Click to expand...

Hmm... I bet it's cheaper to buy and maintain RAID-5 large 'disposable' (IDE) storage than it is to shell out the big bucks on more reliable SCSI drives/adapters.
 
Originally posted by: RaynorWolfcastle
Originally posted by: Sifl
Originally posted by: DaiShan
First off, they are probably using SCSI drives in RAID. Second, they don't have enough space by a long shot to cover 1gb of space for every user. They figure that at 100mb of crap or so most users are going to clean it out.
Click to expand...

Google has always used standard IDE hard drives. Same for yahoo and hotmail on their email clusters I think.
Click to expand...

Hmm... I bet it's cheaper to buy and maintain RAID-5 large 'disposable' (IDE) storage than it is to shell out the big bucks on more reliable SCSI drives/adapters.
Click to expand...

yup. hot swappable IDE drives are a much cheaper solution.
 
Originally posted by: RaynorWolfcastle
Originally posted by: Sifl
Originally posted by: DaiShan
First off, they are probably using SCSI drives in RAID. Second, they don't have enough space by a long shot to cover 1gb of space for every user. They figure that at 100mb of crap or so most users are going to clean it out.
Click to expand...

Google has always used standard IDE hard drives. Same for yahoo and hotmail on their email clusters I think.
Click to expand...

Hmm... I bet it's cheaper to buy and maintain RAID-5 large 'disposable' (IDE) storage than it is to shell out the big bucks on more reliable SCSI drives/adapters.
Click to expand...

All of these providers are nothing more than standard PC's running regular hardware. I used to basically share a cage with google when they first started, their configuration scared the crap out of me. The cage temp went up 15 degrees when they first powered up. The setup was nothing more than a big rack with bare motherboards stacked on one another. They bowed into sortof a "smiley face" because the hard drives were mounted on top of the motherboards, I think by stickey tape or something similar. They had giant fan racks that were serially connected to one another trying to cool it all down but the maze of network cables surely made it difficult.

The temp issue got so critical they cut a giant hole in the wall of the facility and pulled up an external AC unit. If you had a knife you could have crawled in and sabatoged it all.

Anyhoo the OP is overthinking things a bit. 🙂

Edit: it was funny, googles cage was maybe 10x15 feet, while hotmail had the entire upper floor. Times are certainly different now.
 
I doubt that they actually have 100mb aportioned to each user. It's probably like a bank, where the bank only keeps roughly 10% of your money physically on hand.
 
I'm sure that google at least does compress the really old stuff. After all, text compresses REALLY well, and I'm sure the space savings are worth the additional processing time required to decompress the odd request for an older email.
 
If Hotmail uses regular IDE drives, it would seem to indicate an excess of processing power available for compression was available due to the limited ammount of storage available on each box?
 
it's probably a dynamic setup, where as users don't get an actual set amount of space, the server are probably set to share the data until too many build up too much in their account and they have to compensate by adding new hardware..
 
I know exactly how they do it. They have hundreds of huge ICDA storage arrays like theDMX 3000 or CX700.

Each array can have hundreds of 146GB++ fibre channel drives. They plug them into huge SANs and NAS farms that the servers use instead of internal disks, then you access their clustered servers for your email.

Some CAS storage arrays are made to replace tapedrives and they will use hundreds of 320GB+ ATA drives in huge RAID array clusters.
 
The question is, when is hotmail going to start offering 250mb. My account is at 100% every time I look at it.
 
smart move by hotmail because I was going to quit using it. 2MB of space is ridiculous to begin with. Looks like changes will be taken within the next 2 weeks. YAY no more HOTMAIL staff notifications of your mailbox being to full! HURRAY~
 
Originally posted by: kendogg
smart move by hotmail because I was going to quit using it. 2MB of space is ridiculous to begin with. Looks like changes will be taken within the next 2 weeks. YAY no more HOTMAIL staff notifications of your mailbox being to full! HURRAY~
Click to expand...

I'm not going to use Hotmail as my primary account until they get rid of that $#&^&$# banner on every link you click on when you get an email.
 
hmmm.... it's not all that expensive for a large co...

lets say Hotmail has 30 million users, of which 15 million are inactive.

if Hotmail offers all these users a 250MB space, and only actually allocates 10% (25MB), they will need 375 million MB or 375,000 GB

you and I are paying 50cents per GB... i can imagine them paying 25 cents

so the cost of providing 375,000 GB would be about $95,000 which won't exactly keep Bill Gates awake at night....
 
Originally posted by: LeadMagnet
I know exactly how they do it. They have hundreds of huge ICDA storage arrays like theDMX 3000 or CX700.

Each array can have hundreds of 146GB++ fibre channel drives. They plug them into huge SANs and NAS farms that the servers use instead of internal disks, then you access their clustered servers for your email.

Some CAS storage arrays are made to replace tapedrives and they will use hundreds of 320GB+ ATA drives in huge RAID array clusters.
Click to expand...

hot dang, i want a couple of those for home. 🙂
 
Originally posted by: lobadobadingdong
their equipment is more likely of a SAN design. like DEll/EMC's data storage units.
Click to expand...

My understanding is it's on several hundred EMC CX600 & CX700 plugged into a couple SANs



DeeKnow - lets say Hotmail has 30 million users, of which 15 million are inactive.
Click to expand...
Actually they have 300 million accounts with 250 million being active.


DC - hot dang, i want a couple of those for home.
Click to expand...
They actually did come out with a small bussiness model - I belive Dell is reselling them AX100
 
Originally posted by: LeadMagnet
I know exactly how they do it. They have hundreds of huge ICDA storage arrays like theDMX 3000 or CX700.

Each array can have hundreds of 146GB++ fibre channel drives. They plug them into huge SANs and NAS farms that the servers use instead of internal disks, then you access their clustered servers for your email.

Some CAS storage arrays are made to replace tapedrives and they will use hundreds of 320GB+ ATA drives in huge RAID array clusters.
Click to expand...

yup,
hotmain uses completly different strategy from google. Microsoft went for a small pool of rediculous machines (its been on slashdot couple of times, especially when they switched from unix) where as google has thousands of 1u of-the-shelf linux servers.
 
Originally posted by: halik
Originally posted by: LeadMagnet
I know exactly how they do it. They have hundreds of huge ICDA storage arrays like theDMX 3000 or CX700.

Each array can have hundreds of 146GB++ fibre channel drives. They plug them into huge SANs and NAS farms that the servers use instead of internal disks, then you access their clustered servers for your email.

Some CAS storage arrays are made to replace tapedrives and they will use hundreds of 320GB+ ATA drives in huge RAID array clusters.
Click to expand...

yup,
hotmain uses completly different strategy from google. Microsoft went for a small pool of rediculous machines (its been on slashdot couple of times, especially when they switched from unix) where as google has thousands of 1u of-the-shelf linux servers.
Click to expand...


I belive GoogleMail servers themselves are small 1U Linux boxes in clusters - they are just plugged into SANs with those huge storage arrays. Many huge companies will actually have no internal disks at all in thier servers, and if a server dies the just pull out that server - swap over the fibre channel HBAs - and boot the new box thru the SAN off the old server's OS disks - having only a couple minutes of downtime for that one server and no data loss what-so-ever.
 
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