ITIL, Performance Boosting and Presentations

Hi,

In the last past months RockeTier worked (and keep working) with several large organizations in several aspects: 1) design new systems which are capable to do more based on commodity hardware ; 2) boosting existing software performance (lean projects) and 3) establish processes in large organization that support the life cycle of performance from event management, problem management to establishing a continues performance boosting to the organization systems from RFI to production (ITIL oriented projects).

We decided to share with you a presentation to a large telecom oriented company that is considering these days getting into the performance boosting and Lean projects for its main product lines.

Organization Wide Performance Methodology (ITIL)

View more presentations from Moshe Kaplan.

Keep Performing,
Moshe Kaplan. RockeTier. The performance and cloud experts.

Shared Cache: The Windows and .Net memcached

Hi again,

In memory databases and cache are must in any large scale system these days (you can ask Facebook architects regarding it). The Linux guys have memcached and there are many other products (with much more features of course) such as Gigaspaces XAP, Oracle Coherence and Scaleout. However, since Microsoft did not release yet the long expected Velocity product (will it ever be in production?), it seems there is a clear winner to the Windows environment: SharedCache. This product is some kind of a memcached porting to native managed .Net code and it is licensed under LGPL!.
SharedCached is already in production in several major sites including theport.com and it is fully documented. The product supports all major requirement from a caching product including:

1. Partitioning - just like sharding, every server is taking care of part of the data, and the application server are talking with every cache server (unless of course you were wise enough to shard the application servers as well).
2. Replicated Caching - keeping data in multiple instances, making sure data will always be available and lots of reads will be handled correctly.

I recommend downloading and testing this product and see if it fits your product/service needs,

Keep Performing,
Moshe Kaplan. RockeTier. The Performance Experts.

Cloud Computing and Windows 2008

Hi,

It was a long time since the last post... more working, less talking....

Pain
This time we'll talk about a real pain in the Microsoft camp: why Windows 2008 is rarely supported by cloud providers such as Amazon AWS/EC2, AppNexus and Rackspace Cloud?

One of the few exceptions is Microsoft Azure which is still in CTP and is using a modified Windows 2008 version.

New features, New challenges...
Windows 2008 which has a lot of new features such as safer service shutdown and kernel transaction manager also includes a new activation method (which is probably familiar to those of you who use Vista).

According to my conversation with a leading cloud provider, this new activation method prevents them from generating images with predefined keys. Therefore, they cannot provide on demand Windows 2008 instances. The cloud providers are currently in advanced negotiations with Microsoft and provide only Windows 2003 instances.

The Question
Are there hidden causes behind this Microsoft restriction? or will a solution will be found before Azure RTM? Only time will tell...

Keep Performing,
Moshe Kaplan. RockeTier - The Performance and Cloud Experts.