Are disk drives within each GB unit hot swappable? Are GB units themselves hot swappable within a rack?
A. The drives are not hot-swappable. We considered this when designing the boxes, but found that hot-swapping created another point of failure that we did not wish to introduce. However, the drives must still be easy to remove. So we opted for a ready-release scheme that provides an easy latching mechanism for the drives, allowing them to be popped out and replaced as needed. The GB units are linux machines, and will of course power down if removed from the rack. The other machines in the rack remain unaffected by this. When housed in our racks as part of a TB system, the simple, hand-free backside support makes it trivial to remove and install nodes.
