Kevin Closson's Blog: Platforms, Databases and Storage

I was checking out Paul Vallee’s comments about MySpace’s definition of uptime. It seems others are seeing spotty uptime with this poster child of the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

I’m watching MySpace for other reasons though. They have deployed the Isilon IQ Clustered Storage solution for serving up the video content. Isilon is a competitor of my company, PolyServe. Isilon is good at what they do—read intensive workloads (e.g., streaming media). I don’t like the fact that it is a hardware/software solution. I’m a much bigger fan of being free of vendor lock-in. In the end, I’m an Oracle guy and Isilon can’t do Oracle so that’s that.

Anyway, another thing that is interesting about Web 1.0 and now Web 2.0 shops is the odd amount of “IT Street Cred” they seem to get. Folks like Amazon, eBAY and now MySpace are not IT shops, really. They have gargantuan technology staff, and their IT budget is not representative of normal companies. Basically, they can take the oddest of technology combinations and throw tremendous headcount of very gifted people at the problem to make it work. Not your typical COTS shop.

Now, having said that, are these shops solving interesting problem? Sure. Would any normal Oracle shop be able to do things they way, say, Amazon does it? Likely not. Back in 2004, Amazon admitted to an IT budget of USD $64 Million before some $16 Million savings realized in one way or another by deploying Linux.