Exciting news this week from the DAM front: Xinet released their much awaited upgrade, WebNative Suite 17. It seems every nook and cranny of the product has something new and luscious in it. Details here, but I gotta give an overview:

• Massively reworked search engine, producing both faster results and more flexible criteria
• Text content searching across a wide variety of document types
• Richer Asset Timer, with even more built in functionality
• Fine grained administration delegation, allowing security and delegation (all within the familiar Xinet GUI)--
• 3D CAD file support 
• Versioning from within the Adobe Suite

Congrats to Jim Rabkin of DDB, the winner of our monthly iTunes gift card drawing. No purchase necessary, natch -- just arrange for an upgrade to Xinet's award winning, best of breed product WebNative Suite 16 and you're entered.

If we haven't been beating down your door over the last few months, please call or email us and we'll get you on the short list to be upgraded to the latest and greatest version of Xinet's DAM solution.

I've spent the last couple weeks upgrading 2 of the largest Venture database in existence. One took 6 days, the other 7 to convert everything, but baby was it worth it!

One of the biggest pain points of large Xinet installs databases is performance- to increase  performance when you have Millions (or tens of Millions) of records, you need to 'index' things you search on. In the old version large sites could take a week to drop, repair and recreate the database should something corrupt (and things do corrupt- if someone kicks out a power cable, you're gonna break MySQL tables).

Last week I put an index on the file table of one of these GINORMOUS sites in under 4 hours. Under 4 hours compared to 3 or 4 days! Oh, and during that time? Venture was usable.

That's just awesome.

We're a bunch of performance geeks here. We've been tweaking blocksizes, stripe, and interleave settings on disk since SGI first gave you access to 'em. Tuning and re-tuning SWAP size, location, type is in our blood. A few percentage points here, double digit gains there, all without more capex. Gotta love it.

Now, anytime a paradigm shift in technology comes out there's a steep cost differential to it, right? 10Gb networking had only a tiny little blip of time when it was out of reach of the masses, which is a refreshing change. You can kit out most servers with a card, an acceptable managed switch with a 10Gb port or two, for a very reasonably cost.

Why go to 10? Our desktops have had Gb cards for what seems like forever, and very fast CPUs. With just a couple 'power' users you could swamp the networking capabilities of a server. Of course, a handful of years ago disks could only cough up 150Mb/sec or so of sustained data, so network tended to not be the gating factor in server  performance. Modern disk starts at well over 300Mb/sec, and if you stripe or otherwise use some common sense design principles you can achieve multiples of that.

 Xinet and NAPC both use the 1 to 6 rule for users and performance: with 6 retouchers (or 'power' users), you can assume 1 of them will be accessing the server at one time. 12=2, 18=3. It's a rough rule of thumb, but one that seems to stand up over time. 12 heavy hitters can thus drain 120Mb/sec out of a server, which is the better part of 2 1Gb cards bonded together. Add in the other users, doing layout, OPI printing (yep, some folks still use an OPI workflow), and Portal access, you've got a saturated pipe. 10gb gives you a good 800mb/sec of access speed, which will sate all but the most demanding organizations needs for data.

Next of course, we can talk about teaming 10Gb interfaces! (insert evil chortle of delight here).