Disk Based Memcached?
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This  is very interesting:  "As large MediaWiki deployments may gain performance using Memcached, at some level cost of RAM to store all objects becomes too high. In order to balance resource usage and take more use of Apache server disks, Tugela, the distributed cached on-disk hash database, has arrived."  So Tugela  is like memcached but backed by a disk-based btree.  Since most memcached installs are usually backed by MySQL we would just be duplicating some of the work that MySQL already does. Of course this is probably being a bit unfair.  There wouldn't be any locking in this situation.  I'd like to see benchmarks though.  I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be able to beat an InnoDB install.   ...
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Pierre-Alain Joye has an update on one of the PECL packages he maintains, htscanner, on his blog today:   htscanner 0.6.0 has been released. It caches the ini settings instead of looking for htaccess files in the current directory and its parents. The performance impact is yet minimal.   A new ini setting was also added, htscanner.default_ttl, to give the lifetime of the cache. You can get this latest version of htscanner from its PECL homepage.
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SAS, iSCSI and even InfiniBand offer alternative ways to connect servers to storage and are starting to steal some of Fibre Channel's thunder. But while they are, respectively, cheaper and faster than Fibre Channel for direct-attached storage, that doesn't mean the technology is doomed.
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DevShed is starting up another new series today, this time looking at the DirectoryIterator methods out of the Standard PHP Library functionality.   Because this class might be handy to use in projects where handling directories is a must, in this new series I'll be taking a close look at some of its most important methods. We will explore these methods appropriately in conjunction with the corresponding code samples.    They introduce the class, noting why it's handy to use and where's the best place to use it - including an example. They get into a bit more detail, looking at the key() and current() methods as well as using the rewind() method to reset the pointer for the directory.
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Seagate has launched the highest capacity PC hard disk to date. Pitched at desktop computers, the new Barracuda 7200.8 hard disk is a 7200rpm model that&#39;s available with either a fast SATA or Ultra ATA interface
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Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has today launched a high-end Raid storage platform and software offering complex data management. The TagmaStore Universal Storage Platform (USP) is designed to provide up to 32
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Nice!  My patches to java-memcached  went in!    This provides significant savings for primitive datatypes.  Significant meaning the difference between a few gigs of memory vs a few hundred megs.  "11-01-2005 Released the client as 1.2 today. Added in socket timeout on initial connection option. Custom serialization added for primitive types by Kevin Burton. This gets a big space savings for primitives over default java serialization."
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The 0.85-inch diameter drive is a candidate for cell phone storage, but can the product compete against flash memory?
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(Source: Diskeeper) Does fragmentation affect SANs, NAS, and RAID? Many people think it doesn't - but that perception is incorrect. Disk arrays improve I/O performance, but they aren't invulnerable to fragmentation. Read this white paper and discover the technical issues concerning fragmentation, SANs, NAS, and RAID
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On the JSLabs Blog today, there's a new tutorial walking you through the installation of the APC (Alternative PHP Cache) caching system for your PHP installation.   The Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is a free and open opcode cache for PHP. It was conceived of to provide a free, open, and robust framework for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code.   The installation is pretty simple and, once you get things in place the configuration can start. The tutorial lists out several of the options you can use to customize your installation and a brief paragraph on what each of them do.
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Mike Willbanks has posted an introduction he's written up giving some helpful hints at tuning your servers and PHP applications for performance.   The focus of this post is not to show performance related items to specific PHP frameworks since many bottlenecks actually apply before running the framework itself that should certainly be solved up front. Therefore in this posting I attempt to look at simple items that can be deployed in order to produce finer tuned systems.  He talks about a few different aspects:  PHP Performance Tuning (opcode caching, apc file priming, includes, loops, etc) RDBMS Performance Tuning (indexes in queries, query caching, archiving) HTTP Performance Tuning (content compression, css sprites, limit modules, etc)
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Microsoft has unveiled a mid-range storage system that it said will make it quicker and easier to back-up and recover files from Windows servers.
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Hitachi increased the capacity of its Travelstar notebook harddrives. The consumer-targeted 5K100 and E5K100 for enterprise applications offer up to 100 GByte
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In a new post, Lukas Smith mentions (among other things) an upcoming webcast via the folks over at php|architect covering the best practices of using the opcode cache in your applications.    oin us as we host PHP internals developer, Stas Malyshev (Zend) with a presentation on optimizing your use of PHP opcode caching software, be it APC, Zend Platform, or another.   This talk will cover techniques that you can use to squeeze the most performance out of your cache, such as avoiding runtime includes and conditional class declaration.    Register soon because the event happens this Friday (March 16th, 2007) and there is no cost to attend - but you do have to sign up.
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Drobo is a storage appliance that retails for $499 without drives, employs its own disk and storage virtualization algorithms to give users many of the data redundancy benefits of RAID without RAID's complexity.
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Apple updated its Xserve RAID storage system, a 3U high-availability, rack storage system to deliver a massive 5.6 terabytes of storage capacity at the industry&#146;s most aggressive price for storage of just over $2 per GB. Additionally, Apple expanded support for heterogeneous environments with certification from Cisco and SUSE Linux and optimized the system to work with its Xsan Storage Area Network file system. [Oct 19]
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Which is better for backing up the computer on the road Â a flash-memory drive or a portable hard drive?