Yahoo!
Managing Servers
When Yahoo!'s server collection grew to about
30 machines, Nazem began to feel manageability
problems. "We saw that we needed to bring in more
powerful machines for performing search functions
and hosting mission-critical databases," he says.
"We were committed to staying
an Intel architecture shop, but we needed more
memory, more power, and fewer servers. Database
applications are both memory and CPU-intensive,
and search is very memory-intensive. If you
have only one CPU accessing memory, it's not
as cost-effective as having multiple CPUs accessing
that memory. We needed to move to an SMP architecture
to gain the ability to share memory across machines."
The company also wanted
to move its Web directory database to a powerful
commercial database system that could accommodate
future growth and sophisticated data mining.
Up until then, this directory had run on "home-brew"
database software that did not provide the expandability
and flexibility that Yahoo! needed. "As we continue
to add new services to our site, we seem to
exponentially increase the amount of storage
our servers need to access. It was clear that
we needed to move up to a larger class of servers,"
says Nazem.
Yahoo! brought in four
Compaq ProLiant* 5000 servers, each with four
200 MHz Pentium Pro processors, a half-gigabyte
of memory, and four 4-Gbyte drives of RAID storage.
These machines are running the Microsoft Windows
NT* Server network operating system and the
Oracle* 7.3.2.2 relational database management
system. The company's Web directory database
currently contains approximately 600,000 records.
Yahoo! is also acquiring
approximately five Compaq ProLiant 2500 servers,
which are 2-way Pentium Pro processor-based
servers, for running its front-end user query
search function. These servers will probably
run a version of UNIX*.
"If the 4-way Pentium Pro
processor-based servers had not been available,
we would have had to go to a RISC machine,"
says Nazem. "That would have taken us off the
Intel architecture track, imposed a huge learning
curve on my staff, and cost us a lot of money.
We're very glad this next step was available
to us. In fact, the Intel architecture is keeping
pace nicely with the performance demands of
the Internet, which is probably experiencing
more growth and stressing computer systems more
severely than any other area of computing today."
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