Miscellaneous

A few miscellaneous things:

• We rolled out enclosure support in Boglines today.
• Reaction to the release of the Bloglines Mozilla Toolkit yesterday has been fantastic. I’m not surprised, it’s a super cool piece of code.
• Bloglines will have some downtime late Friday night. We’ve run out of space in our current location at the co-lo, so we need to move.

The Internet Archive is building a Petabox or 1,000 terabyte storage system. There’s a bunch of fascinating information there, including heat/power/air flow calculations. They’re going with 1U/half depth enclosures, running VIA processors, 512 megs RAM, with 4 300 Gb IDE drives each. Contrast that with the published specs of the machines that Google apparently uses for its clusters, which are P3 boxes, with 2 gigs RAM and 2 80 Gb IDE drives. With more RAM and fewer drives per controller, I’d expect the Google boxes to perform much better, but the IA machines get you much more storage bang for the buck. As usual, life’s a series of trade-offs.

Reading about a 1,000 terabyte cluster makes the 5 terabytes that we’re adding to Bloglines right now seem tiny. I never thought I’d say that about 5 terabytes….