Around here at the PornJob, we do a fair amount of research into building very large, very scalable systems to deliver lots of media content to thousands of users. We’re always trying to solve the same problem, over and over, though:

How do we store hundreds of thousands of movies in a redundant, distributed fashion across many data centers, and bring users to that content quickly?

There’s lots of ways to do this. Rsync, automated copies, directory analysis, usage pattern analysis, etc. Most of them have the same problem: Moving data takes time.

But have you looked at zvents? Their recent work on hypertable shows that they can make things happen, and that their strength lies in their engineering and not their domain name.