Highwired.com: Hardware Decisions

Highwired.com provided to high school students and teachers, a range of free services to enable school interaction on a personalized Web site. Highwired.com's network had grown from 1,000 member high schools to over 12,000 schools in 50 states and 72 countries, in only 13 months. Due to its blistering growth, it was approaching its peak load capacity in June, the end of the school year. The vice-president of product development expected that growth would continue at that pace and wanted to ensure that they struck the right balance between low response time and minimal downtime, and acceptable hardware costs. Any changes had to be made before school started in September. He wanted to confirm that his recommendation to use multiple servers with redundant network storage devices attached was the optimal solution. To do so, he examined site performance metrics, server configuration options and additional hardware.