Transparency sucks. It's just a toy. It looks cool, but doesn't do anything, and sometimes makes things hard to see. "Sometimes" is often enough to make the whole thing a net negative.

If it looked cool and never got in the way, then I'm all for it. I'm not one of these anti-aesthetics weirdos we have roaming Slashdot. However, it does get in the way, so it shouldn't be used.

They don't do business the same way you do. If the monitoring tool shows a pod with 2 drives down, they just ignore it. Two RAID arrays out and they might replace it. When all three go, they pull the pod and replace with a new one. Then they scavenge the carcass for parts. The magic is in the software. They don't simply save files on servers, they have software that manages where things are stored and stores everything in multiple places.

To give some perspective, at your stated one or two percent failure rate per month, a 45 drive pod would last over a year before all three RAID 6 arrays were likely to have failed. Just "refresh" the dead drives in each pod every three months and the likelihood of actually losing a whole pod is miniscule.

In their world, a drive failure is a non-event. An array failure is an "indicator of possible proplems". A pod failure is a reason to schedule it for maintenance tomorrow. The only thing that might get them to sweat is if they lost 10% of their boxes simultaneously.

There are two ways to run a reliable business. Either buy expensive reliable stuff and watch it like a hawk, or buy cheap stuff and make it redundant and self-healing.

Well, what the hell is [Microsoft] supposed to do? Allow [Netscape] to provide [a] key service of its product: [web browsing]? That's like Pepsi shipping Coke inside their bottles. [Netscape] should promote their service in their own product, not encroach into [Microsoft]'s turf.

Do you still like your line of thinking?