Deepa Damodaran
'How soon will GMail run out of storage space?', when in August 2010, I wrote this piece of blog, on how large is the storage lot of the e-mail giant was, little did I assume that very soon I will have to swallow my own words.
On Monday the search engine giant Google's mail service GMail, encountered the first glitch of 2011, wherein 1,50,000 GMail users have reportedly lost their e-mail, attachments and Google Chat logs.
Having said that, however, this glitch was not due to the lack of back-up space. Instead, was the doing of a software bug, which sneaked into the mail boxes during a storage software update, says Ben Treynor, VP Engineering and Site Reliability Czar (24x7) in The Official GMail Blog. Google has, however, stopped the deployment of the new software and reverted to the old version.
He also added though the glitch could have been solved in milliseconds, since GMail stores 'multiple copies of your data, in multiple data centers', this time around the situation seems to be different and might take more time than the expected.
"Well, in some rare instances software bugs can affect several copies of the data. That’s what happened here," Treynor adds.
That doesn't mean that Google has lost all those data that went missing from user's mail boxes because Google backs-up its data into tape as well and since they are offline, are out of the reach of software bugs. Thus Google engineers are already on their feet to redress the issue.
“But restoring data from them also takes longer than transferring your requests to another data center, which is why it’s taken us hours to get the email back instead of milliseconds,” he adds.
Although, 1,50,000 makes only about a 0.02 per cent of all GMail users, it doesn't reduce the enormity of the issue. We can only hope, the sooner it restores the better for Google, or else it is losing its credibility.
So does this incident verify the claim that cloud is not so safe after all? How much ever one says that tapes and disks are breathing their last, and will be wiped out soon, such occasional incidents do verify the importance of these predecessors. What do you think?
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