Cross-posted from the AADL Devblog The AADL Summer Game has an online shop where earned points can be spent on awesome schwag. To try to make it easy for the volunteers and staff to fulfill the orders we took advantage of some of the infrastructure we already had in place for other parts of the site. As some know our hold notices currently go through a script that sends an email along with printing a custom label to a label printer, that is used for identification on our hold shelves.

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Google just released a research paper entitled Availability in Globally Distributed Storage Systems. It is available for download in PDF format (14 pages). From the abstract: We characterize the availability properties of cloud storage systems based on an extensive one year study of Google’s main storage infrastructure and present statistical models that enable further insight into the impact of multiple design choices, such as data placement and replication strategies. With these models we compare data availability under a variety of system parameters given the real patterns of failures observed in our fleet.

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