There was quite a lot of fuss last week about the Gmail outage that caused about 30,000 Gmail users to lose all their mail, contacts, etc. 30,000 sounds like a lot, and it is, but it represents only 0.02% of Gmail users.
The problem seems to have stemmed from a “storage software update.” On the data protection front, a sub-story emerged when Google said on in a blog post that it was working on restoring data from tapes.
Oh mercy! The comments flew. How could Google be using tape of all things! Of course they are using tape, others replied, it’s still the best way to store data! On and on it went, and it wasn’t always polite. There was a lot of name calling, especially in the comments sections of various blog posts.
I was thinking of commenting myself, until I came across an excellent blog post by Storage Switzerland’s George Crump at InformationWeek. He writes “What We Can Learn from the Gmail Crash,” and I think he covers the main lessons that came out of this event and does so without taking sides or calling the other guy stupid. I recommend it for a sensible look at an event that reminds us yet again that sooner or later data loss issues hit everybody.
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