Scalability Blog

The biggest advantage of Solid State Drives is lack of moving parts as compared to traditional hard drives.  This allows the drives to survive longer, and have faster read and write times.  It makes them ideal for an enterprise environment where performance and reliability are expected.  The SSD drives use less than a third of power compared to SAS or SATA, and promise twice the life expectancy.   Power consumption alone should save …

Nginx is a popular reverse proxy application that is very efficient at serving static content and forwarding requests to other webservers.  It can provide a much needed performance boost for websites that have a lot of visitors and static content like images, videos, PDF files, etc.  While dynamic content like PHP, Python, Ruby, and other scripts, are passed off to an interpreter.  This is usually an Apache webserver, which receives a request …

Introduction
There are many reasons an individual or organization may need/want to encrypt their data. Unfortunately, encryption of data can cause extra overhead and slightly degraded performance, depending on the method being used. We’ve chosen to highlight block-layer encryption, as it gives the best overall performance among the most commonly used methods.
Note: This example setup used involves encrypting the entire /home partition. This partition will need to be manually unlocked each boot by …