Here’s something I didn’t know: Paypal runs its servers on Linux.
PayPal runs thousands of Linux-based, single-rack-unit servers, which host the company’s Web-presentation layer, middleware and user interface. Thompson says he quickly saw the economic, operational and development advantages of open source and Linux technology. He now sees no other way to do it.
“When you’re buying lots of Big Iron, as I did in other places I’ve worked, your upgrade path is US$2 million, US$3 million at a clip. You just had to buy big chunks of stuff to scale,” he says. “Here at PayPal, our upgrade path is 10 US$1,000 no-name servers, slapped into the midtier of the platform. And we just keep scaling it that way. It’s unbelievably cost effective.”
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“Rather than have a monolithic box, or an impenetrable fortress that never breaks, we just have so many [nodes] that the breakages are irrelevant,” Mengerink says. Using a proprietary operating system to build out a system with a thousand points of failure would not be an option, he says. “This distributed, highly redundant system we have is predicated on the cost model of Linux and Intel,” he adds.
The database is still Oracle running on Solaris servers, which to me shows that this is not a decision made out of zealotry but purely because of its business advantages.
Personally I’ve been thinking about buying Mac Minis for my company’s servers (oh, I hadn’t mentioned I started consulting full time again, had I?), which are cheap enough, stable and provide a base from which I can run virtualization solutions if necessary. I’ve considered other Mini-ITX solutions but they seem to be still pretty much in do-it-yourself land, and I’d rather focus on producing great software than in managing hardware.