[UPHPU] Volunteer-USA

[Brandon Clinkscales]

Hello,
I joined the Utah PHP Users group to invite any developers who would 
like to volunteer their time or services to take a look at 
Volunteer-USA. We are a nonprofit located in Idaho who seeks to help 
volunteers serve in service projects and also during large-scale 
emergencies. It is the latter part that leads me to invite you for help. 
We are building a distributed network to provide for such emergencies.

I have spoken with the Senior Vice-President of the Boston Consulting 
Group regarding IT strategy and business modeling. He thoroughly 
appreciated the work of Volunteer-USA, and considered it a step beyond 
what his company is doing to help another Volunteer match-making company 
roll out its "next generation" website.

We are using a three-tier network that is almost identical to the 
network LiveJournal.com uses to serve 6.9 million hits per day. During 
emergencies we anticipate needs far in excess of this, and we are 
preparing a network topology, remote installation, a monitoring service, 
and a means of entirely automating this distributed network. Though this 
does not relieve the overall burden of proper system administration, it 
certainly goes a long ways to make it easier.

Technical Overview:
Perlbal acts as a reverse-proxy to fetch URL requests from the backend 
from the clients. Perlbal maintains a cluster of backend Apache servers 
that provide the application level web services we offer. (Please visit 
http://www.volunteer-usa.org for an brief overview.) MySQL acts as a set 
of replicated servers, clustered by state, to distribute data.

Security is vital, so we have standardized on OpenBSD with a 
high-security model. Performance is an issue, though we anticipate more 
than enough server capacity during large-scale emergencies to 
accommodate for this short-failing. Most notably, our network is Disk 
and I/O bound, not CPU bound. This places our focus on overall bandwidth 
capacity and hardware.



 (inet)
    |
    |
  perlbal            apache/php           MySQL
+------------+      +-----------+       +-----------+
|     1      |      |     1     |       |     1     |
|------------|      |-----------|       |-----------|
|     2      |------|     2     |-------|     2     |
|------------|      |-----------|       |-----------|
|     3      |      |     3     |       |     3     |
|------------|      |-----------|       |-----------|
|     4      |      |     4     |       |     4     |
+------------+      +-----------+       +-----------+




Integrated Communications Model:
Webmail: Tied to existing email addresses, phone numbers, and postal 
addresses to provide a comprehensive emergency mail service.

(1) Webmail                                                        (1) 
Webmail
(2) Alerts                                                         (2) 
Email forwarding
(3) Notifications                                                  (3) 
Instant Messenger
(4) Reports                 -------->   Volunteer-USA  ----------> (4) 
SMS Cell Phone Text Messaging
(5) Displaced Populations                                          (5) 
Voice Broadcasting
(6) Available Housing                                              (6) 
Notification
                                                                  (7) 
RSS Feeds


If anyone has any questions or comments, please contact me as soon as possible. I look forward to speaking and working with you. Thanks.



-- 
Regards,
Brandon Clinkscales
Volunteer-USA
President

p: 208-226-4451
f: 925-401-1860
e: brandon at volunteer-usa.org
w: www.volunteer-usa.org