[liorean]

Just as an aside, Google calculates on being able to accomodate about 100 million users, with about one million signing up this year (according to various sources on the net that may or may not know what they are talking about). That means that they calculate coldly on being able to get about 100 petabytes (about the double their current storage capacity) to handle just mail.

Also, I wouldn't say that is an impossible feat. Don't forget that we're talking about a company that has three copies of the web in RAM, and several copies in multiple places on magnetic media.

Andrew: It'll not be a single dedicated server building. It'll be THE Google computer, a distributed computing system consisting of currently about 100 000 servers in datacenters of 10 000 to 15 000 servers each, across the globe. The same system that powers the search engine.