update just found a great article on scaling with CouchDB using Lounge http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/683838234/scaling-couchdb

and a company that provides the service Cloudant: https://cloudant.com/

Here's another shard manager project, Pillow: http://knuthellan.com/2010/07/14/feature-prioritization-for-...

I think the design philosophy for couch is keeping smaller pieces of Big Data synchronized. The sum of all those small pieces is like one larger database.