CTO::Weblog

A piece at Data Center Knowledge about Wikipedia’s infrastructure. Being a non-profit with no revenue at risk and small budgets to spend, they take a very different approach to availability, running one main co-lo in Florida with about 300 servers and focusing on performance more than availability.
“The traditional approach to availability isn’t exactly our way,” […]

James Hamilton writes from Google IO and reports for what I think is the first time on the actual numbers of Google servers and other juicy tidbits. The full report can be found here but here’s a summary:

Single search query touches 700 to up to 1k machines in 800K servers
Install 1000 machines and in […]

Interesting article here by David Cheriton, head of Distributed Systems at Stanford. David has an interesting history as an angel investor, being an angel only three times: Google, VMWare and Aster Data Systems. This article is a neat summary of why the future of MPP is in smart software and not complex networks.

I’ve been a long time admirer of FreeBSD. It’s reliable and seems to focus on the things I find important for running a business than the sugar-coated desktop eye candy that many other distros spend their time on. The latest version (7.0) was launched a few weeks ago and it’s stuffed full of some really […]

Adam Bosworth writes an insightful piece about how databases have failed to keep up with the times. I didn’t realize how much we’ve learnt to put up with things like Oracle, Postgres and even mySQL until I read the article.
The scary thing is he wrote this article over three years ago…
Read the article here.