High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

Datacenterknowledge.com: In an effort to boost its refocused cloud computing initiative, Sun Microsystems (JAVA) has acquired Q-layer, a Belgian provider that automates the deployment of both public and private clouds. Sun says Q-layer’s technology will help users instantly provision servers, storage, bandwidth and applications.

Do you have experience with Q-layers technology like its Virtual Private DataCenter and NephOS?

Sun FireTM X4540 Server as Backup Server for Zmanda's Amanda Enterprise 2.6 Software

by Thomas Hanvey (Sun Microsystems) and Dmitri Joukovski and Ken Crandall (Zmanda)
September, 2008

Explosive data growth, combined with demanding requirements for data availability, has placed a tremendous burden on IT operations staff at businesses of all sizes. Yet, many organizations do not have the staff or budget to purchase and manage complex and expensive backup and recovery software products.

The Sun FireTM X4540 server can deliver massive storage capacity and remarkable throughput so it is well-suited as a nearline storage platform for backup and restore applications. Combining the power of the SolarisTM 10 Operating System with the data integrity and simplified administration of ZFS, the Sun Fire X4540 server can be an ideal candidate for streamlining and improving backup and restore operations.

Amanda Enterprise Edition from Zmanda was designed to address these challenges, providing a backup and recovery solution that combines fast installation, simplified management, enterprise-class functionality, and low-cost subscription fees. As an open source product, Amanda Enterprise Edition uses only standard formats and tools, effectively freeing you from being locked into a vendor to recover your archived data. This guide discusses how to quickly configure the Sun Fire X4540 server as a backup server for Amanda Enterprise
Edition software.

Update 2: EBay's Randy Shoup spills the secrets of how to service hundreds of millions of users and over two billion page views a day in Scalability Best Practices: Lessons from eBay on InfoQ. The practices: Partition by Function, Split Horizontally, Avoid Distributed Transactions, Decouple Functions Asynchronously, Move Processing To Asynchronous Flows, Virtualize At All Levels, Cache Appropriately.
Update: eBay Serves 5 Billion API Calls Each Month. Aren't we seeing more and more traffic driven by mashups composed on top of open APIs? APIs are no longer a bolt on, they are your application. Architecturally that argues for implementing your own application around the same APIs developers and users employ.

Who hasn't wondered how eBay does their business? As one of the largest most loaded websites in the world, it can't be easy. And the subtitle of the presentation hints at how creating such a monster system requires true engineering: Striking a balance between site stability, feature velocity, performance, and cost.

You may not be able to emulate how eBay scales their system, but the issues and possible solutions are worth learning from.

So what are we announcing today? That in addition to acquiring MySQL, Sun will be unveiling new global support offerings into the MySQL marketplace. We'll be investing in both the community, and the marketplace - to accelerate the industry's phase change away from proprietary technology to the new world of open web platforms.

Read more on Jonathan Schwartz's Blog

What do you think about this?