Cassandra is a robust and highly scalable NoSQL datastore that usually consists of multiple nodes spread out across multiple datacenters.  If you are the system administrator for a large Cassandra deployment then you might be curious as to how your cluster is doing.  In fact your job probably depends on it!  So how can you combine a great service like Monitis with Cassandra to make sure you cluster is buzzing along smoothly?

The Internet is a great resource, but it is sometimes too much to wade through hundreds of web pages looking for tips about using Tomcat with a database. So we at Monitis have done it for you! Below are some of the more useful tips found in various places on the Internet.

1. Top 10 Open Source eCommerce Software (Joomla and Drupal) – Part 1/2
This is for all you eCommerce store owners. Previous posts compared 20 shopping cart software vendors, including Shopify and Volusion. This post is similar, but focuses on open source shopping cart softwares for Drupal and Joomla. The first post covers the following 5 products/vendors: Hikashop, SimpleCaddy, OpenCart, redShop and RokQuickCart. Each is described with a list of Pros and Cons.

In our last article we discussed performance tuning of Hyper-V storage I/O. In this article we’ll focus on network I/O performance best practices.

Hyper-V supports synthetic and emulated network adapters in the virtual machines, but in general the synthetic devices offer much better performance and also reduce CPU overhead. Both types of adapters are connected to a Hyper-V virtual network switch. If you need external network connectivity you can connect the virtual switch(es) to a physical network adapter.

Let’s start by taking a look at synthetic network adapter configuration.

This is the second of two articles about open source ecommerce software that we hope will help web developers and system administrators in selecting what is best for their needs. The first article  Top 10 Open Source eCommerce Software (Joomla and Drupal) reviewed: HikaShop, SimpleCaddy, OpenCart, redSHOP and RokQuickCart.

The following article details our own analysis of the last 5 vendors in our article series.

Hadoop, which was named after a toy elephant, is a serious framework for doing distributed data processing across thousands of nodes and petabytes of data.  It’s loosely based on some big time Google projects, MapReduce, Big Table, and Google File System.  A key thing to understand about Hadoop is that it’s not just one monolithic project. Hadoop has a number of different pieces that all work together to help you crunch some very big data.

Hadoop is all about processing data, and Hadoop’s MapReduce engine is what makes all this processing possible. MapReduce is a process that Google came up with for churning through petabytes of data on commodity hardware. Here’s how it works.

Monitoring out of Paper with Monitis (Printer Monitoring)

Last time, we scratched the surface of what you can do with performance counters and Monitis.  Today, we’ll show you a fun performance counter to help automate your office, and also show you how you can use the Monitis module to make and updating custom monitors a lot simpler.

One of the fun sets of performance counters are the printer counters:

At Monitis we want to make the lives of web developers and system administrators easy!

We have reviewed the 10 most popular open source ecommerce platforms for Joomla and Drupal and would like to share our thoughts with you. In our two articles there is a list and short analysis of the 10 open source ecommerce software products to help guide you in finding a solution that best suits your needs.

Our first article will cover the following 5 products/vendors: Hikashop, SimpleCaddy, OpenCart, redShop and RokQuickCart.

1. Performance Tuning Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V: Hardware Selection
This is a followup to a previous article that got substantial reads, Performance Tuning Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V: Hardware Selection. Several future posts will delve deeper into this topic. This post walks you through selecting the optimal hardware on which to run Hyper-V. Recommendations are given for selecting the right processor, memory, network adapter, storage, and installation process. If you’re interested in running Windows 2008 in a virtual environment, these tips can save you a lot of headaches.