[LINK] google services

[andrew clarke]

On Fri, Feb 16, 2007 at 02:57:02AM +1100, Adam Todd wrote:

> At 01:22 AM 16/02/2007, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
>
> >As of Wednesday, Gmail offered users about 2.8GB of storage space for e-
> >mail, one of the more generous limits for free services.
> 
> If you have 1 million users that's a lot of storage space.  I'm not even 
> going to guess what the term would be.  That exceeds Terrabytes and 
> Pecabytes.  Must be in the exabyte range, or maybe Google just head off and 
> build a Yottabyte storage facility?

I imagine they are hoping (probably quite reasonably) that their users
will only use a small fraction of their allowed storage space, and thus
only budgeting for that.  For example, one million users averaging only
100 Mb each is still a lot of storage space, but doable.  I wouldn't
like to be responsible for backups though.

> I wonder if they are applying some form of compression on the database?

I think a lot of their space would be used by non-compressable
attachments, eg. JPEGs of family members, and forwarded video clips of
cats playing table tennis.