When we started Plaxo we were running on a handful of Linux boxes. In fact, I think we had as many development machines as we did production servers. The initial roll out was 2 database servers, running MySQL, each with a couple IDE drives in them of around 80gigs a piece. That was about 3 and a half years ago.

Once we started growing we moved into Dell servers with their external storage, that was ummm...interesting. Let's just say that Dell should stick to what they are good at, making desktops. So we moved on.

Now we've grown to over 200 servers, which includes over 25 DB pairs (primary/secondary for redundancy), each capable of storing between 600gig to 1TB. We're still running MySQL, on InnoDB, but not much else is the same. We've installed a SAN environment built around storage from Pillar Data Systems, and a whole slew of servers from Penguin Computing , which run very nice Opteron chips from AMD. I won't go into more specifics as to what we have in place, but will say that it takes 6 full data center racks to hold just the storage, and no we aren't being paid by Pillar or Penguin to say this. :-)

Here's a glimpse at a bit of the storage:

Yeah, we know it's not a huge environment, and there are certainly larger environments in most any data center, but we thought it'd be interesting for our customers to understand what it really takes to run this service. Maybe it'll entice a few of you to show your appreciation and become premium users, hint hint.

Some of you have been watching the OPS Blog, which we keep updated with any issues that the service is experiencing. It's not a perfect service, but we try darn hard to provide a fast, reliable and secure experience, and hope you can bear with us when we do have little issues.

Finally, we're hiring in the OPS department if any of you talented Operations Engineer/Unix Admin types are looking for a challenge! See ya next time.

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