high scalability - use cases

A friend of mine just pointed me to a website today with a lot of information about scalability. What looks most informative and interesting is that it has use cases from some of the big website names and how they deal with scalability issues.

The website is:

http://www.highscalability.com

probably one of the most interesting reads there is the article on database "sharding", where to achieve maximum scalabiity, you part out your database in smaller chunks on more midrange servers. makes for a good approach. Rather than scaling up, you scale out. you can use midrange or low end hardware and you minimize bottlenecks.

definately a good read if you have 5 minutes on your hands. http://highscalability.com/unorthodox-approach-database-design-coming-shard