Ethernet vs. Station Wagon
I was reading Jonathan Schwartz’s recent post about moving a petabyte of data. Jonathan talks about how it’s faster to move a petabyte of data from San Francisco to Hong Kong by boat than it would be to send it over the internet.
This is amusing to me because 5 years ago when I was at Excite we were discussing the same phenomenon. When Excite@Home started tanking, the company sold off the Excite assets to iWon. The transfer included our approximately 4 million US webmail users and all of their mail. iWon was only interested in their mail (they didn’t care about our software…not that I’m bitter or anything). When it came time to discuss how we would migrate the mail data from our data center in Redwood City to the iWon data center in New York, it was decided that we would open up IMAP access to our mail servers and iWon would siphon the mail across the country.
Needless to say, it was a slow process and required a couple of passes for iWon to make sure they had a fully sync’d copy of the mailboxes. Several of us wondered if it wouldn’t be faster to rent a truck, roll the EMCs into it and drive it the approximately 3,000 miles out to New York. Yahoo! Maps pegs the trip at around 42 hours. Granted, we probably couldn’t take the service down for that long. We could have just taken the tape backups, threw them in a couple of boxes and shipped them using some next-day service to New York. It probably would have been faster.
