Everyone is treating this failure as if them managing a MogileFS system (or just sticking the content on network attached storage) would never see downtime. It's silly.<p>Maybe you could have done better. Maybe you would have lost all your data permanently. Let's not be so over-the-top that we think our infrastructures don't have vulnerabilities. That's what I like about Smugmug. They at least cop to the fact that their more expensive internal systems had problems too.
"But what we had never considered is that our "anti-normalization" design principle also relates to stability of design."<p>You might not have thought of it. But Werner Vogels did.<p><a href="http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/12/eventually_consistent.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2007/12/eventually_consi...</a>