xgrr.de – the whole not the half

Recently I visited the social network Hyves which is very popular in the Netherlands and saw and job offer for a system engineer/administrators position. In the comments to this position there was harsh critics about the network of Hyves which consists currently of about 1700 servers running Gentoo Linux.

When I read more about the infrastructure I realy wondered why they need 1700 which results in A LOT of money for operation and maintanance. I’m not the only one who said this but the tone was different than my . I saw a thread about virtualization which is working very well recently for non real-time applications.  And Apache, MySQL or whatever they use as a backend is not real-time.

However they reason the choice for a lot of servers with the need for I/O throughput (when you read my blog closely you will see that I/O performance is the big problem when working with virtualization). What I wondered so much is that no post mentioned the use of SAN. They certainly have something similiar otherwise I don’t want to know how they store all the data they gather. So why don’t they use it for virtualization? Good SAN provide a lot of needed I/Os as well as redundancy. When using in combination with NFS (very upcoming – SANs are mostly connected by using iSCSI) the bottleneck of low I/O operations is decreased.

I for myself run VMware very successfully. With a good plan and VMware Infrastructure 3 or something similiar a consolidation of the needed servers can be done and the overall costs decreased.