I had so much to say in response to a recent post asking about virtualization from Jennifer Glore that I realized it was long enough to be a blog post.

It really depends on what you’re looking to do. Many companies don’t have the money and staff to have an in-house data center with proper power and network redundancy; others don’t want the depreciation associated with owning computer hardware (even if they leased space in a data center, they’d have to buy equipment to put in it).

Some reasons to virtualize:
1) you need a fresh machine and cannot wait to order a new one or re-purpose an older one.
2) your need for machines/services fluctuates (and again, re-purposing takes time). This need can be as broad as employee desktops or as …

SmugMug , a photos and videos publishing site, goes into Production on Open Solaris + MySQL + ZFS. Check out this story on why a Linux geek decided to move his site from Linux To Open Solaris.

Don MacAskill, chief geek and CEO of SmugMug says"  ZFS is the most amazing filesystem I’ve ever come across. Integrated volume management. Copy-on-write. Transactional. End-to-end data integrity. On-the-fly corruption detection and repair. Robust checksums. No RAID-5 write hole. Snapshots. Clones (writable snapshots). Dynamic striping. Open source software. " He is also excited about the CoolStack 5.1 stack available in Open Solaris along with …

SmugMug , a photos and videos publishing site, goes into Production on Open Solaris + MySQL + ZFS. Check out this story on why a Linux geek decided to move his site from Linux To Open Solaris.

Don MacAskill, chief geek and CEO of SmugMug says"  ZFS is the most amazing filesystem I’ve ever come across. Integrated volume management. Copy-on-write. Transactional. End-to-end data integrity. On-the-fly corruption detection and repair. Robust checksums. No RAID-5 write hole. Snapshots. Clones (writable snapshots). Dynamic striping. Open source software. " He is also excited about the CoolStack 5.1 stack available in Open Solaris along with …

SmugMug , a photos and videos publishing site, goes into Production on Open Solaris + MySQL + ZFS. Check out this story on why a Linux geek decided to move his site from Linux To Open Solaris.

Don MacAskill, chief geek and CEO of SmugMug says"  ZFS is the most amazing filesystem I’ve ever come across. Integrated volume management. Copy-on-write. Transactional. End-to-end data integrity. On-the-fly corruption detection and repair. Robust checksums. No RAID-5 write hole. Snapshots. Clones (writable snapshots). Dynamic striping. Open source software. " He is also excited about the CoolStack 5.1 stack available in Open Solaris along with …

I recently attended an interesting talk by Brion Vibber, CTO of WikiMedia Foundation, a non-profit organisation that runs the infrastructure for Wikipedia. He described how his team of 7 engineers manages the Wikipedia site that gets on an average of 7 billion page views per month. The highlights from the talk are listed below that included the architecture of the site infrastructure to scale up to the traffic that is received. They are ranked amongst the Top 10 sites in terms of traffic.

The site runs on the LAMP stack and you know what that is:

• Linux
• Apache
• MySQL from Sun
• Perl/PHP/Python/Pwhatever :-)
  

WikiMedia runs the site on about 400 x86 servers. Of those, about 250 run the webservers and the remaining run MySQL database. Recently they acquired the …

I recently attended an interesting talk by Brion Vibber, CTO of WikiMedia Foundation, a non-profit organisation that runs the infrastructure for Wikipedia. He described how his team of 7 engineers manages the Wikipedia site that gets on an average of 7 billion page views per month. The highlights from the talk are listed below that included the architecture of the site infrastructure to scale up to the traffic that is received. They are ranked amongst the Top 10 sites in terms of traffic.

The site runs on the LAMP stack and you know what that is:

• Linux
• Apache
• MySQL from Sun
• Perl/PHP/Python/Pwhatever :-)
  

WikiMedia runs the site on about 400 x86 servers. Of those, about 250 run the webservers and the remaining run MySQL database. Recently they acquired the …

I recently attended an interesting talk by Brion Vibber, CTO of WikiMedia Foundation, a non-profit organisation that runs the infrastructure for Wikipedia. He described how his team of 7 engineers manages the Wikipedia site that gets on an average of 7 billion page views per month. The highlights from the talk are listed below that included the architecture of the site infrastructure to scale up to the traffic that is received. They are ranked amongst the Top 10 sites in terms of traffic.

The site runs on the LAMP stack and you know what that is:

• Linux
• Apache
• MySQL from Sun
• Perl/PHP/Python/Pwhatever :-)
  

WikiMedia runs the site on about 400 x86 servers. Of those, about 250 run the webservers and the remaining run MySQL database. Recently they acquired the …

MySQL is the defacto database of choice for most WebScale and Cloud Computing deployments.

Every day you go to website like Facebook, CraigsList , eBay, Google, PriceGrabber, Yahoo!, and Zappos, you are touching a page that  uses MySQL.
MySQL's popularity is due in large part to its flexibility. MySQL supports over 20 platforms and scales to handle terabytes of data. And, because MySQL is open source, it can be customized to an application's unique specifications. This flexibility has two-fold benefits for ISVs: MySQL is better able to address their applications' specific needs and it won't impose restrictions on their future development.

Through the Sun Partner Advantage Program(SPA) , ISVs can now leverage Sun's entire portfolio of offerings - including MySQL. The SPA Program connects ISVs with free or deeply discounted technology offerings as …

Zembly team has deployed a new application on Zembly called myPicks U.S. Election 2008.

Use this to voice your opinion on the campaign issues being debated in the U.S. Presidential Election - wherever you are in the world.

You can launch the game from: http://zembly.com/mypicksus/

While the frontend is running on Network.Com, the backend including the MySQL server is running on EC2 and data resides on S3

The game is available as a Facebook and MySpace App.

Some cool mashup. They use Dapper to convert some Election related URLs into a API and feed it into the Zembly code/widgets.

Good CloudComputing stuff, check it out!

Seriously kids, what’s with the lack of scalability? I’ve never seen CNN or the NYTimes go down on “trimmed” versions.

Is it a question of bandwidth? Is it lack of hardware?

Take for example, Malaysiakini (the first alternative news source in Malaysia, with a subscription model built around it). It runs FreeBSD, uses PostgreSQL, and has a CMS on top of it (so almost a LAMP stack right there). There’s even use of Squid for caching. Yet there’s lacking load balancing? This is where the cloud can come into play, when there’s high traffic.

Next up, …