giganews blog

Corporate culture, personal experiences, and unique observations about Giganews, Usenet, Newsgroups, and Usenet related technologies.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Giganews first to 800 days retention -- and not stopping!

Leading the Retention MarathonA little over a year and a half ago, we announced that we were going to be the first Usenet provider with a year's retention. We got to that year, and then just kept going. We hit two years a little while ago, and still kept going. Today, we've hit 800 days of binary Usenet retention -- and we're still going.

800 days is just a number, though. None of that retention matters if we don't also have good quality. For all 800 days, we have over 99% of the articles. On top of that, when we lose servers or disks, you don't see random articles disappear temporarily. In fact, most customers don't notice anything at all. Finally, our oldest, 800-day-old articles are stored on the same servers as our newest articles. If you want to fetch posts from 800 days ago, they'll download just as fast as posts that arrived today.

Our software and systems were designed years ago to handle this level of retention. Today, we hit 800 days of retention, but we're already ready for the next 800 days and beyond. Please enjoy the retention, and keep an eye out for new features we'll be rolling out in the coming months.

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1 Comments

Anonymous Anonymous said...

So what sort of system (Windows, Linux) and disk storage systems do you guys use to get that retention? Are you managing Terabytes yet? Running a RAID 5 storage configuration? And what sort of internet bandwidth do you have?

Just curious. Don't plan to build my own anytime soon!

7:46 AM