[Zope] data storage

[jacob walcik]

i'm currently planning to implement zope to power a large number (200+) of
hosted sites.  the sites all receive moderate ammounts of traffic, and are
currently dispersed across three seperate webservers.  

we're running into what seems to be a rather significant problem--where do
we store the data for the sites?  

right now it's in an outdated, unstable, and rather unreliable RDBMS (an
older version of snap's primebase server).  the original plan was to
migrate it to MySQL, however since much of the content is (more or
less) static, ZODB may be a better option.  

the docs on zope.org (particularly this
one:http://www.zope.org/Members/anthony/sql_vs_ZODB) don't really address
some of my concerns, such as, if we have 2GB of data we need to stick in
the DB, and the ZODB always stays loaded in memory, what kinds of problems
may arise (i envision terrible swapping problems)?  is it even reasonable
to expect the ZODB to hold that much data?

the appeal of using ZODB is that we can use all of the features of zope.
projects like berkelystorage seem to be a step towards a middle-ground
style solution, but it doesn't look like they've reached a very stable
release yet.  

has anyone else out there run a setup like this?  or just a zope
implementation with a large ammount of data (zope.org comes to mind)?
what kind of solutions where used (hardward or software-wise)?  am i just
incredibly mistaken when it comes to how zodb stores it's data?

--
jacob walcik
jwalcik@notwithstanding.org