Jason's .plan

Cloud-scale DBs in the cloud…just a quickie

Just a quick set of thoughts…do cloud-scale DBs save money because they’re based on commodity/cheap servers? Tonight I did some rough back-of-the-pad calculations, and was kind of surprised… Let’s assume we’ve got an 11TB working set of data, how could we store this redundantly? (cloud servers in these examples are dedicated servers at a cloud provider) Option 1: [...]

Rabbits and warrens.

However, there are three in-particular, that are designed to be highly flexible message queues for their own sake: Apache ActiveMQ ZeroMQ RabbitMQ Apache ActiveMQ seems to get the most press, but it appears to have some issues not losing messages. ... So, without further ado...here is a reduction of a weeks' worth of reading up on AMQP and how it works in RabbitMQ...and how to play with it in Python: Playing telephone There are four building blocks you really care about in AMQP: virtual hosts, exchanges, queues and bindings.

Viva la storage.

Coming soon… [Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

HSPA (AT&T) vs. EV-DO (Verizon)

Some folks hate to be offline, and some folks can't afford to be. I suppose I fit somewhere in between. About a month ago, I realized I was going to be doing some significant traveling…probably nowhere near a decent WiFi access point. Thus arose the question…how do you connect back to the office regardless of [...]

Remember the Alamo…

Tomorrow (05/28/2008) I'm giving a talk on moving to open storage (i.e. ethernet, OpenSolaris and SATA…in no particular order) at the Diocesan Information Systems Conference in San Antonio. It's a closed event, but here are the slides from the talk…including the talking notes which cover a lot more than I'll probably have time for: PDF Slideshare DigiTar, DISC, [...]

Democratizing Storage

As a company that was heavily populated with Linux zealots, it’s been surreal for us to watch OpenSolaris develop for the past 3 years. While technologies like DTrace and FMA are features we now use everyday, it was storage that brought Solaris into our environment and continues to drive it deeper into our services stack. Which [...]

Pretty on the inside…working with the UI on the AX2200.

It's nice when you boot an appliance and the web user interface doesn't look like it was designed by a guy who thought Jurassic Park and The Net were the pinnacle of UI design. The A10 Advanced Core OS (ACOS) has an incredibly polished look to the WebUI. Frankly, its beautiful. All chrome and glass so to speak… Overall, the [...]

Lost in wonderland again…unboxing the AX2200

It's been nearly two years since we ventured into the wonderland of replacing our Alteon gear with the Sun N1216. It was a big risk because load balancers are interlaced tightly with our multi-phased mail logistics architecture. To say the least, we have not been disappointed. The Sun N1216 series is by far the best load balancer [...]

patchadd wherefore art thou? (Installing Sun Studio 12 on Indiana DP2)

So you've got a shiny new Indiana DP2 install and you want to load Sun Studio. Hypothetically, let's say you're looking to compile mod_python. Then, half-way through the Sun Studio 12 install you hit a wall:/usr/sbin/patchadd doesn't exist. What's a boy to do? The problem is that the SUNWswmt package which contains patchadd was omitted accidentally [...]

OpenSolaris as Storage Server @ BizExpo

I'm giving a presentation today at the Boise BizExpo about using OpenSolaris as the foundation for your storage infrastructure. It's a partial re-work of my ZFS talk at FORUM 2007, but focuses more on building a NAS/SAN platform out of OpenSolaris and less on ZFS in particular. If you'd like to see it in person, it's at 11:00am [...]