I don't think ECC is going to give anyone a false sense of security. The issue at Google's scale is they had to spend thousands of person-hours implementing in software what they would have gotten for "free" with ECC RAM. Lacking ECC (and generally using consumer-level hardware) compounded scale and reliability problems or at least made them more expensive than they might otherwise had been.
Using consumer hardware and making up reliability with redundancy and software was not a bad idea for early Google but it did end up with an unforeseen cost. Just a thousand machines in a cosmic ray proof bunker will end up with memory errors ECC will correct for free. It's just reducing the surface area of "potential problems".
Using consumer hardware and making up reliability with redundancy and software was not a bad idea for early Google but it did end up with an unforeseen cost. Just a thousand machines in a cosmic ray proof bunker will end up with memory errors ECC will correct for free. It's just reducing the surface area of "potential problems".