Ever wondered how Facebook handles half a billion people a month?

Check out this other keynote from OSCON by David Recordon.  Who is David? From his Bio on his Web Site.

"David Recordon is the Senior Open Programs Manager at Facebook, where he leads open source and open standards initiatives. He joined Facebook from Six Apart where he focused on platform strategies, and previously worked at VeriSign in the emerging business group. David has played a pivotal role in the development and popularization of key social media technologies, such as OpenID and OAuth."

It's pretty high level but the numbers are impressive.  Today they are taking in between 80 and 90 TB of data a day.  In 2008 they only took in about 1.2 TB.  Check it out for a cool insight that isn't focused on the privacy issues they are dealing with but the real nuts and bolts technology and how most of it, if not all of it, is Open Source.  On the Facebook Web Site there is even a whole page dedicated to the Open Source they use, support, created and released.

Great article about tools no sysadmin should live without...

Every sysadmin I know is a little different.  Some prefer GUI tools and others prefer the good old command line.  All of them though have a certain set of tools that they use every day.  Jon Buys at ostatic.com lists several of my favorites like free and rsync.  He offers great insight into the tools and hopefully will help you be a better sysadmin.(Assuming that is what you want to do.)  Check it out and then let us know what your favorite sysadmin style tool is...

Good things to remember when hiring consultants....

spidertools.com has an interesting little story with some great steps you should use whenever you engage a consultant.  The author using a forest fire analogy to make his points  about how you should protect yourself and your company from what I would call "Brain Drain".  When you hire a consultant you should also make sure part of your contract includes documentation and training.  When I was consulting I always tried to get customers to understand and where possible actually be able to fix the problems they encountered.  While not every problem or solution should be attempted by a novice user of any OS there are plenty of situations where this is an option.  If you don't put it in the contract you will never become familiar with any troubleshooting or solutions leaving you tied to the Consultant to update the server or fixing the problem in the future.

10 reasons to use an Open Source CRM Tool...

So this story gives 10 great reasons to use an open source CRM Tool.  The great thing about the article is that while it is a good discussion of for CRM a lot of the reasons fit very well for almost any coroporate tool.  The suggestions are sound and the thought process is great.  If you are dicussing using or switching to a CRM(Customer Relationship Management) software this article is a great read for ideas of why to choose open source.

CTO-Brief Released: What's the Best Linux Distrobution for the Enterprise?

Check out our thoughts and give us yours over in the CTO-Briefs section of the site.