The launch of new website of RGE Films, our movie distribution partner, allowed me to unleash my geek power. So we employed several bleeding-edge technologies for me to play with. So, if you are interested in what technology is powering you favorite web site, you can read here.
The new generation web site we launched before few weeks is codenamed “Shadow” – it’s a nice wolfish name, I think. The main servers running Shadow are running in two-node cluster. Each node server has quad-core processor, eight gigabytes of RAM and almost one terabyte of disk space available.
We are using the HP ProLiant DL 320 G5 servers. I’m not too happy about that, because I have previous bad experience with Hewlett-Packard servers (I’d prefer IBM or Dell servers instead). On the other side, the hardware isn’t my problem and it was chosen by my friend’s company who will take care of it. As a developer, I’m generally not interested in hardware.
The cluster is running on 64-bit Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition, which is the highest edition of newest Windows server system available now. Entire infrastructure we have for Shadow (web servers, secure download servers, database etc.) is virtualized using the new Hyper-V technology, which is part of Windows Server 2008.
Virtualization allows us to host several servers (with different operating systems and purpose) on top of single physical machine. This allows us to better utilize computing resources, electricity and space in data center. In virtual servers we are running mixture of different operating systems, but generally we are running on Windows Server 2003 and 2008.
There is a bunch of other less-interesting servers used for support services (like e-mail, name servers, public download servers for static content etc.). In our studio, we have another pack of computers caring about production, video editing, encoding and movie authoring – maybe I’ll tell you more about them next time!
The web application itself was developed in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 using the latest ASP.NET 3.5 and Microsoft Internet Information Services 7.0. This new version of IIS is great! Is extendable and can be easily modified to suit our needs. Entire secure download site is built using custom IIS 7 modules and handlers. That means than unlike in the previous version you should be able to use download managers to download movies from our secure servers. For database we are using Microsoft SQL Server 2005 now and we plan to upgrade to SQL Server 2008 as soon as possible.
So, that’s what you are “talking” with when browsing our web sites. Sorry for not having any pictures of cute girls with red butts in todays post. I was unable to sneak any of them into the datacenter ;-) Anyway, I’m probably the only person finding combination of powerful computers and naked girls exciting and blinking lights of rackmounted switches (the computer kind, not the wooden ones) romantic…