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Why would moving the servers be hard? You can fit 100 terabytes of storage in a shoe-box these days. I'd be extremely surprised if you couldn't run all of FogCreek off of a single 10U blade enclosure. That would be up to 128 CPU cores; I suspect they need only a small fraction of that.

On the other hand, with a 1000/Mbit uplink that they were allowed to saturate, they'd still only be able to copy out 1 terabyte in 3 hours.

Essential quote (literally from Networking 101): "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."




Depends on your mental model of "servers." People have different views of servers from "that nosiy hot thing under my desk" to multiple cages and dozens of racks with 1G, 10G, 40G fiber, rack switches, core switches, edge switches, terminal servers, database servers, application servers, monitoring servers, corporate boxes, .... All with various weights, accessibility, cable routing, and those damn three servers with stripped mounting screws that have been there for six years.

100 TB of high speed RAID-10 would fit in maybe 30 shoe boxes.

Then, after things are moved, you have to deal with drives that have jiggled loose, components that outright fail to work again, or things that get accidentally broken in transit.

Let's just declare an emergency federal holiday until Nov 2 so everybody can recover without dangerous heroic measures.


In this case my mental model of "servers" is "the computers that run the specific small company under discussion, who has already said that they can move them if they want to".

We seem to be arguing separate points -- I'm saying that it's not unreasonable that a small company could be moved fairly easily. Possibly as easily as unplugging a blade enclosure and throwing it in a station wagon. There are loads of small businesses that can run on an amount of hardware that can be easily transported. (When I used to gig on electric bass, my amp and other rack gear was in a portable 8U rack and that was more "portable" than the 100 pound speaker cabinet.)

I can't tell if your point is that it's unreasonable for all companies, which is wrong, or that it's unreasonable for some companies, which is obvious.




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