[Catalyst] Hypothetical Site and Scalability Planning

[J. Shirley]

On 10/26/07, Wade.Stuart at fallon.com <Wade.Stuart at fallon.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> NFS gets a bad wrap,  as long as you do sane planning and lay it out
> properly NFS works very very well for servicing static files to the
> webservers.  Breaking out to S3 seems silly (Amazon is out to make money
> with S3 and if you do it yourself you should be able to do it for less
> cost),  KISS works wonders as long as you think about usability.  Get a
> Sysadmin to think out the NFS side realistically (Masters with multi read
> onlys etc).



NFS gets a deserved wrap.  It isn't anybody knocking it, but it is simply
not the best tool for the job, and it wasn't designed to be used in a way
that services millions of requests out... Sure, it can do it, but it isn't
meant to do it.

And using S3 is a great way to scale out and save money -- look at SmugMug.
Sure, you could do it yourself if you ignore the cost of a dedicated
sysadmin for your infrastructure.  If you're sufficiently talented, you can
easily manage the rest of your cluster -- storage is _ALWAYS_  a thorn when
you do it in house.  You need expertise.  If you have to get a sysadmin just
because you want to use NFS, all the cost savings of doing it in house just
blew up.

And if you do want to do it in house, compare it to MogileFS -- MogileFS may
not give you the same performance numbers as NFS, but it has tracking and
replication built-in; NFS misses that and requires you to do a lot of things
on your own.

If you really know what you are doing, NFS can be great.  If you don't, NFS
will haunt you in your dreams.  If you have to hire someone to maintain your
NFS cluster then I would recommend just paying the money to Amazon -- at
least Amazon can be written off like a business expense.

-J (who has nothing against NFS, just more in favor of other services)


-- =

J. Shirley :: jshirley at gmail.com :: Killing two stones with one bird...
http://www.toeat.com
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