I've been looking into Akka lately and it looks like a great framework for building scalable servers on the JVM. However most of the libraries on the JVM are blocking (e.g. JDBC) so don't your lose out on the performance benefits of using an event based model because your threads will always be blocked? Does Akka do something to get around this? Or is it just something you have to live with until we get more non-blocking libraries on the JVM?
Have a look at CQRS, it greatly improves scalability by separating reads from writes. This means that you can scale your reads separately from your writes.