High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

The RAD Lab (Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory) wants to leapfrog the Big Switch and create The Next Big Switch, skipping the cloud/utility evolutionary stage altogether. This hyper-evolutionary niche buster develops technology so advanced the cloud disperses and you can go back to building your own personal datacenters again. Where Google took years to create their datacenters, using a prefab Datacenter Operating System you might create your own in a long holiday weekend. Not St. Patrick's of course.

Their vision: Enable one person to invent and run the next revolutionary IT service, operationally expressing a new business idea as a multi-million-user service over the course of a long weekend. By doing so we hope to enable an Internet "Fortune 1 million".

How? By wizardry in the form of a “datacenter operating system” created from a pinch of "statistical machine learning (SML)" and a tincture of "recent insights from networking and distributed systems." But like most magics it's not so outlandish once you understand it:

A blog covering what the data center of the future will look like.

A Quick Hit of What's Inside

The Next Generation Data Center Blog, Funding Instrumentation

Amazingly TechCrunch runs their website on one web server and one database server, according to the fascinating survey What the Web’s most popular sites are running on by Pingdom, a provider of uptime and response time monitoring.

Early we learned PlentyOfFish catches and releases many millions of hits a day on just 1 web server and three database servers. Google runs a Dalek army full of servers. YouSendIt, a company making it easy to send and receive large files, has 24 web servers, 3 database servers, 170 storage servers, and a few miscellaneous servers. Vimeo, a video sharing company, has 100 servers for streaming video, 4 web servers, and 2 database servers. Meebo, an AJAX based instant messaging company, uses 40 servers to handle messaging, over 40 web servers, and 10 servers for forums, jabber, testing, and so on. FeedBurner, a news feed management company, has 70 web servers, 15 database servers, and 10 miscellaneous servers. Now multiply FeedBurner's server count by two because they maintain two geographically separate sites, in an active-passive configuration, for high availability purposes.

How many servers will you need and how can you trick yourself into using fewer?

That's what people at the NGDC Conference get together and talk about. A lot of interesting subjects: data center virtualization HPC & grid; advanced facilitates management and planning; advanced network and services; applications; data center optimization and security; managing and protecting information. The Grid – Distributed Computing at Scale presentation is an interesting one.