[consulting] enormously scalable project

[Greg Knaddison]

2009/3/21 Victor Kane <victorkane at gmail.com>:
> Whereas I agree that people interested in this specific project should
> contact Sam off list, on the other hand I would be extremely interested in
> being able to locate a list of consultants/firms experienced in scaling /
> very large scaling in general.
>
> Do we have the ability to look up that kind of info?

My impression is that most firms dabble in this area to at least some
extent.  You can get an idea of who has knowledge on the topic based
on participation in http://groups.drupal.org/high-performance  (Josh
Koenig, Khalid Baheyeldin, Steve Rude, Moshe Weitzman, and Robert
Douglass stand out as strong contributors to the discussions in that
group).

However, there are four firms I'm aware of with specific focus on scalability:

http://www.tag1consulting.com/ - "LAMP Performance and Scalability
Experts" tap into experience running drupal.org and several other
large scale sites to help their customers.  Also have some good
resources (patches, articles) on their site.

http://fourkitchens.com/ - Pressflow is their distribution of Drupal
which has extra patches to make it perform/scale better in a MySQL
only environment.  They also provide advice on hardware/software for
scalability.

http://www.workhabit.com/products/elastic2 - Provide services around
scalable Drupal in Amazon's cloud, and historically have offered
consulting on making Drupal scalable elsewhere as well.

Acquia - nothing generally available yet, but Dries mentioned in the
2009 roadmap that they will offer a product code-named "Fields" to
help people scale Drupal on Amazon's web service infrastructure -
http://buytaert.net/acquia-2009-roadmap  They are probably offering a
closed beta of this now - contact a sales rep if interested in trying
it out.

I don't have direct experience with enough of these firms to make any
comments about which one to choose.  I think it's great we have so
many choices and, from my interactions with the firms so far, many
high quality choices.

Regards,
Greg

-- 
Greg Knaddison
http://knaddison.com | 303-800-5623 | http://growingventuresolutions.com