Web site hosting environment on Sun 4500

Is there anyone out there running a web site hosting environment with Oracle on the back end? If so, I'd be interested in hearing what kind of hardware and software you're running and how well it works.

We currently have about 600 hosted customers, due to expand to over a thousand by the end of the year. Our plan is to consolidate all of our customers on a single platform for easier administration; currently we're using MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server on a number of hardware platforms.

Our plan is to move everyone to Oracle, and we're looking at the Sun 4500 as our hardware platform. I'm trying to figure out how well all this stuff is going to scale, if we can run all these sites on a single 4500 or if we'll have to purchase more. The front-end web application layer will be Sun Netra's, and we'll be using the 4500's on the back end, either in a fail-over or clustered environment.

SO, my question: is anyone out there doing something like this, and if so, what's been your experience? Is it possible to run close to a thousand customer web sites on a single 4500? These sites will be anything from small mom 'n pop sites up to Fortune 500 company sites. Am I out of my mind to run a single instance of Oracle with one schema for each site?

I'd sure be interested to hear any comments, suggestions, or even derisive laughter.

Thanks,
--Walt Weaver
  Bozeman, Montana, USA Received on Mon Aug 07 2000 - 08:27:53 CDT