I was all over the internet one day and ran into a project called Cassandra. Which was opensourced by Facebook and is being developed by Apache committers as well as other major companies.
http://cassandra.apache.org/
I also dug up another Facebook related project called Hiphop, which compiles PHP into native C to boost performance. Also used by Facebook.
https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/wiki/