I am currently trying to convince the bigwigs at my company that Drupal is the way to go to provide us with a CMS solution for our clients' sites. We set up new sites for clients all the time and manage and host them. Right now we are running on IIS utilizing a CMS written in classic ASP that cost the company some umpteen gaziliions of dollars to make.
Over the last few days, I have recreated in Drupal our CMS including not only all of the current features we have, but all the features that we want but don't have another gazillion dollars to pay to have made in ASP (not to mention that billion years of development time it would take). The Drupal solution is much more elegant, solves a lot of problems, and gives us access to things we couldn't do before.
I am going to present this solution to everybody early this week. I have mentioned before our need to switch to open source technologies and have sensed some resistance. "If it didn't cost us a fortune, how can it be any good?" I hear questions like; "Will it scale?", "Who will manage it?", "Can these Apache servers really perform?" etc.
I need some help coming up with some good data that I can throw at them. I'd love to have some case studies, impressive looking graphs, examples of BIG Drupal sites, some stuff about Apache, organizations like 2bits&Acquia that can give us support, etc. I'd like to be able to say "a reasonably configured drupal install running on yada yada hardware should be able to handle X users a day." You get the idea.
I've of course been searching around reading up on this stuff, but I could really use some help from people with more experience. So lay it on me. Help me inspire confidence in Drupal (and Apache/Linux/etc.) with the bigwigs.
Comments
Drupal is scalable but I
Drupal is scalable but I think you need a company to manage it. I can recommend 2bits as a professional support.
Hi sam1am, have you
Hi sam1am,
have you contacted 2bits and Acquia already? Just recently I dealt with Acquia in preparation for some big client business (for which I'd always recommend an Acquia subscription) and they proved to be very supportive. I'm not sure if they have some of that "impressive looking graphs", but it only takes a quick look at the customers of businesses like 2bits, pingVision, Acquia, ... and you get a pretty good idea that anything is possible.
Try to get across, that while Drupa is for free, service is not and that frontrunners like the aforementioned take their share of responsibility by giving back to Drupal with patches, modules, sponsorship, money, .. to keep Drupal alive and kicking. This makes Drupal stronger than any commercial product that is backed up only by one business (the one that sells it).
If you can get that across you may be able to buy some time for another presentation / meeting in which you can present some more specific detail.
May the source be with you,
Alex
Happy to help
Sam, we do presentations to VP's and C level executives who are new to Drupal every day. Happy to help.
Here are some organizations who are using Drupal today: http://acquia.blip.tv/#919200.
Here are some case studies: http://drupal.org/cases
Here is the Drupal infrastructure team presentation on how we got Drupal.org to scale: http://association.drupal.org/blog/kieran/Drupal-org-infrastructure-stat...
Cheers,
Kieran Lal
Drupal community adventure guide, Acquia Inc.
Drupal events, Drupal.org redesign
Site Management System
Over at the company I work for, we are using Drupal as a base for our internal 'Site Management System' (MSMS) that will be used for deploying similar sites using a base build out along with a number of customized modules then adding in themes that cover both the base environment and customized 'site' theme and module needs.
Examples:
http://www.jacksonville.com
http://www.cjonline.com
Our environment currently consists of using Drupal 5 (we are in the process of going to Drupal 6 now) with Cisco Load-Balancers up front, a pair HP Servers with 8GB Ram running Squid/Squirm (i.e. caching images, static content), a RHEL 5.x 4-node HP Server environment utilizing 8GB Ram + Global File System (GFS) along with Apache 2.2, PHP 5.2.8, APC and Memcache PECL libraries, a Memcached 4-node cluster (based on the same architecture), the SMS/Drupal environment running several modules (i.e. Feedburner, Boost, Memcached API, Throttle) and a MySQL database server environment that is using tmpfs for alleviating disk I/O issues for temporary tables.
Our sites get 'Dugg' and 'Fark'd from time to time, but our environment never has a stroke and keeps on plugging along. The sites that are currently using our MSMS platform average from about 3,000 to 5,000 unauthenticated/unique users and 500 authenticated users every hour.
3,000 to 5,000
Can you translate this into page views for me?