Amazon announced high I/O instances today. This is huge for anyone with a database larger than available memory, as it’s been a complete nightmare dealing with EBS up till now. Now your Cassandra, MongoDB, MySQL, or whatever your using should be able to perform well without requiring keeping your entire dataset in memory.

With each instance you get 2x1TB of disk. In this tutorial I’ll be setting it up as a RAID0 to get a single 2TB disk which should deliver excellent performance.

Before you get started, make sure you’ve got mdadm installed:

apt-get install mdadm

To begin, check fdisk and make sure your 1TB drives are mounted.

root@ip-10-140-128-232:~# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/xvda1: 8589 MB, 8589934592 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1044 cylinders, total 16777216 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / …

Ephemeral Nodes in EC2 are good and bad... No guaranteed storage (like EBS, Elastic Block Storage), but you get guaranteed full disk bandwidth, which you can make even better if you RAID0 the disks.

Suppose you built the Cassandra cluster by making every node, but one, an ephemeral node...
And then you set up ONE node, as EBS backed up node (with unpredictable or relatively bad performance).
Then you set up that node to be the seed node for all other nodes, which makes schema management even easier.

On all ephemeral nodes, set up Snitch (in cassandra.yaml) as:

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Build a Cassandra cluster out of 3+ m1.large nodes, using ephemeral storage...

Once you start building a node with ephemeral storage, it makes no longer sese to do RAID1 or such -- any hickup, and it's all going to be blown away anyway...

The trick is to build a seed-node with EBS-storage and change the Snitch -- look for my posting on how to do that.

This ec2 incantation shows you, how to get the two ephemeral drives as sdb and sdc:
ec2-run-instances ami-5139f538 -t m1.large -g sg-b5eff2d9 -s subnet-d5c7fdbc -b /dev/sdb=ephemeral0 -b /dev/sdc=ephemeral1

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We’ve seen the rise of open source software in the enterprise and also beyond the IT industry, but the real keys to openness and its advantages in today’s technology world — where efficient use of cloud computing and supporting services are paramount — exist in open application programming interfaces, or APIs.

Open source software continues to be a critical part of software development, systems administration, IT operations and more, but much of the action in leveraging modern cloud computing and services-based infrastructures centers on APIs. Open APIs are the new open source.

Read the full story at LinuxInsider.

First of all, I wish you a happy new year.
Many things happened last year, it was really exciting to be involved in the MySQL ecosystem.
I hope this enthusiasm will be increased this year, up to you !

To start the year, I propose the MySQL[plus] Awards 2011
It will only take 5 minutes to fill out these polls.
Answer with your heart first and then with your experience with some of these tools or services.

Polls will be closed January 31, so, vote now !
For “other” answers, please,  let me a comment with details.

Don’t hesitate to submit proposal for tools or services in the comments.
And, please, share these polls !

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, …

DOCOMO adopts, invests in Couchbase. Apache Cassandra reaches 1.0. And more.

# DOCOMO Innovations adopted Couchbase as DOCOMO Capital invested in the NoSQL database vendor.

# The Apache Software Foundation announced Apache Cassandra v1.0.

# Nuxeo announced the availability of Nuxeo Cloud.

# SGI formed a distribution relationship with Cloudera and …

“Our experience from PNUTS also tells that these systems are hard to build: performance, but also scaleout, elasticity, failure handling, replication. You can’t afford to take any of these for granted when choosing a system. We wanted to find a way to call these out.” – Adam Silberstein and Raghu Ramakrishnan, Yahoo! Research. ___________________________________ A [...]

Red Hat grows revenue 20%+. Google withholding Honeycomb source code. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca, and daily at Paper.li/caostheory
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Red Hat reported Q4 revenue up 25% to $245m, FY revenue up 22% to $909m

# Google is withholding the source code to Honeycomb for the foreseeable future.

# Rick Clark explained why he left Rackspace amid concerns that the company is exerting too much control over OpenStack.

# DataStax …

Funding for OpenGamma. Riptano becomes OpenStax. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca, and daily at Paper.li/caostheory
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# OpenGamma raised $6m series B funding.

# Apache Cassandra-supporter Riptano changed its name to DataStax and has added 50 customers in 6 months.

# WANdisco acquired the SVNForum.org Subversion user community.

# Univa hired the principal engineers from the Grid Engine team, will publish a …