Wikimedia's Wikipedia.org is one of the most visited websites approaching 250 million unique visitors per month.  New content is pushed in by the over 100,000 volunteers who edit the articles.  This announcement "Wikimedia Selects Sun Microsystems to Enhance Multimedia Experience..." describes how users can now upload large video files using the servers and open storage environment provided by Sun and other open source organizations.

The solution is built up in an open source paradise:  MySQL, Apache, Sun's Open Storage infrastructure all on Sun's X4500 and X4150 Servers connected to Sun StorageTek arrays.

An article by …

Wikimedia's Wikipedia.org is one of the most visited websites approaching 250 million unique visitors per month.  New content is pushed in by the over 100,000 volunteers who edit the articles.  This announcement "Wikimedia Selects Sun Microsystems to Enhance Multimedia Experience..." describes how users can now upload large video files using the servers and open storage environment provided by Sun and other open source organizations.

The solution is built up in an open source paradise:  MySQL, Apache, Sun's Open Storage infrastructure all on Sun's X4500 and X4150 Servers connected to Sun StorageTek arrays.

An article by …

It's been over a month (and three hurricanes in America) since I've posted a blog. More than a few of you've noticed - thanks for the prodding...

It's been a busy summer, on nearly every front. Customer activity hasn't slowed down, and the good news surrounding the (otherwise unfortunate) economic crisis embroiling many customers (especially those in the financial services industry, a heavy concentration for Sun) is that it's whipping up the winds of change. Customers facing spending pressure, or tiring of vendor price increases have new options, and there's a new appetite to explore those options (nothing like mandates from the CEO to reduce spending by 50%).

One of my more interesting recent meetings wasn't with a customer, though, it was with an equity analyst from a global financial institution. Equity analysts publish research that feeds the investment community - their (free) research and financial analysis accompanies …

It's exciting to see how many technologies Sun is working on.

On May 1, I took a few members of our operations and database team to meet with Vasu Prakash who is an Engagement Architect with Global Systems Engineering division of Sun Microsystems. Vasu generously let us pick his brain regarding a wide range of exciting technologies Sun is working on and to see how they may potentially address our needs and challenges.

The following notes are my personal notes expanded with some articles from my bookmark collection.

Thumper
- Thumper (X4500) offers 48TB (SATA HDD) in a 4U at around $1.30/GB, runs Solaris OS and ZFS and supports RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 5, 6 enabled by RAID-Z and Raid Z2. X4500 supports 16GB RAM and needs 200-220 V AC for power. For non-Solaris users, other operating systems are supported as well.
- We initially …