handy.de - Germany's mobile portal #1

Hi MySQL ppl,

let me introduce ourselfs. We at handy.de are - according to an independent study of Media Metrix (MMXI) - Germany's mobile portal #1 and e-commerce shop #3 (behind bol.de and amazon.de). Currently we've got 1.8 Mio active Users... all managed by some MySQL Servers.

Actually we've got four MySQL 3.22 Servers running on Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 (also with Kernel 2.2) and we're using VA Linux Hardware only. One of the Servers runs on a Quad Xeon 550, the rest on Dual P3-850 all with 1GB Ram and Mylex Raid 0+1. All four servers have a patched Kernel and Glibc with higher process limits etc. running. We're planning to move to 3.23 and Linux 2.4 in the next month because of the increased SMP performance and some new features we want to use.

Within the next two month we're building a new Mailsystem for our Users (every User has a @handy.de Mailaccount - btw. a handy is the german word for cell phone) consisting of six VA Linux 1U Servers all of 'em running QMail, authenticating Users via two MySQL Servers where one of both is a write Master and both are used for balanced SELECTing. The Users mailboxes will subsist in a 70TB SAN using QLogic FibreChannel Hostadapters, DotHill Storage Subsystems and Gadzoox FC Switches.

We had to choose between User authentication via an Open LDAP Cluster or a MySQL Cluster. We decided to use the MySQL Cluster, because it's easy to add additional read slaves so we don't have to worry about bottlenecks with the DB and because we've got about four Years of MySQL experience and almost no LDAP experience. In addition, as you might have seen or know, we've got one of this 5000 Euro one year extended login phone email support license with you, so in the end it was self-evident that we chose MySQL.

So in the end we use MySQL to store informations about cell phones, ringtones, icons and our users. It serves as backend for our Webcluster, Mailcluster, Wapservers and it's the driving force behind our SMS Spool. We also use it for logging purposes because some guy of Yahoo! Germany told us that it works great and he was right... each of our 9 Webservers for www.handy.de produces about 6GB Logfile a week so we wrote a script that summarizes the logs and puts it's output into a MySQL DB.

We had some process limit problems on our Linux Systems, but thanks to your support we where able to patch the linux boxes and move the limit to a size that meets our needs (we've got an average of about 1600 concurrent threads per server). So we're very satisfied with MySQL and it'll be our database of choice also for the future (though Oracle wishes we'd use their DB, especially because we're a Bertelsmann profit center and they're using Oracle.. they also wanted to give us a 85% discount (right, they offered us to only pay 15% of the usual listprice) on all their products but what do we care when we can have MySQL for free, running on much cheaper hardware :).

Now that we're sure that we'll be using MySQL in the future, we'd like to ask you to add us to your list of MySQL users and if you want to, you can quote me on everything in this mail.

Cheers,
Lukas