[bro-stick]

There's at least two broad classes of error correction and detection: at-rest and in-flight.

Each storage hierarchy component (RAM, SSD, CPU caches, etc.) and interconnection (chip-to-chip, add-on card, cable to another box) needs to be looked at for risk of nondetection/data loss based on risk consequences of the intended use.

For example, billing database servers for a successful company probably should use RAID array/SAN/NAS (say RAID6 or ZFS with RAIDZ3) and Chipkill ECC memory on an enterprise-class box with decent vendor support.

CDN boxes for serving free, static content can be almost anything.

For larger shops, they have the economies of scale to ask from OEMs and ODMs to build custom boxes that are more optimized than COTS gear at Dell, HP or CDW.

When Jeff's venture takes off, they might explore gear customized for running Ruby and/or partnering with 37signals and the like to have OEMs/ODMs folks develop better performing gear and open source it like Facebook has.