Open Source for mission-critical systems (slightly OT)

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 05:30:52PM -0400, Francois Ouellette wrote:
> RE: [TLUG]: Open Source for mission-critical systems (slightly OT)Enterprise systems, admin, database, desktop, anything that makes a business work and keeps it running!

Well I used to work at a company that built the system futurephoto runs
on (Futureshop's online photo system for storing images and getting real
photos printed from digital images).

It uses apache+php4 for the server and scripting, ghostscript (gs-esp as
far as I recall) to render crops, imagemagick, jpegtools and
netpnm-tools for manipulating images, postgresql for the database,
debian for the linux os, a few small custom applications for doing
additional tweaks for photo enhancement to pnm streams on the way
through the pipe, a few custom windows programs to run on the kodak DLS
systems that run the photo lab system to let it receive orders from the
linux system, and of course a whole lot of bash, perl and php scripts to
provide the whole user interface and backend of the system.

Last I talked to anyone they had passed 2TB of images stored, and I
suspect they may have gone quite a bit past that by now.

The postgresql database has since been replaced by oracle since that is
what futureshop uses for their main web site, and replication isn't
something postgresql really does yet.  Having an active mirrored
database was always something we wanted but didn't have.

The file storage moved from a linux server doing nfs with fibre channel
connection to an ibm SAN to a pair of solaris systems with veritas since
they could do live failover of nfs and share the san drives using
veritas.  Not that the linux system ever had a failure that needed
moving to the backup fileserver, but it was nice to know that it was
there when needed.

Load balancing was initially done with iptables and iproute, but later
was taken over by a dedicated pair of serveriron loadbalancers, again
for redundancy reasons and it was what they were used to from their main
site (which by the way is running IIS as far as I know).

Overall lots of opensource software doing the work, and initially all
open source, only being replaced at a later point to privide redundant
systems in case of hardware failure.

Looking at the old site (before they were bought out by best
buy/futureshop because they really liked the system) and it appears they
are now Siberra (which appears to be still a division of
bestbuy/futureshop given the number of opengraphics and futureshop
people I see on the site) and they have a press release about doing a
photo storage site for rogers.  I was wondering what system rogers was
using to do their photo storage, and now I think I know.  Probably the
same one built on open source tools as we did for futureshop (and a few
other smaller clients around the world).  Certainly looking at the
features and choices of prints from rogers's photo site, it looks to be
the same system, with yet another interface (good thing it was made
modular to allow new interfaces to be added on).

So at least in the online photo handling it looks like a lot of
companies are relying on open source to do the work.  I don't know if
they realize it or not, or even care, as long as it is always up and
running and working for them.

Lennart Sorensen
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