When Classmates made plans to upgrade its computing systems, it decided to operate with Red Hat Linux on Dell servers on the front end. On the back end, Classmates installed Apache servers and Solaris on Sun servers with Oracle. We performed several failovers in both directions, and it recovered flawlessly, stated Ortiz. The product proved to be easy to use and required very little administration. This is a tremendous benefit to Classmates because it is crucial that our Web site database remains available to our users at all times, said Ortiz.
Classmates uses a two-system setup, with a primary database server and a backup database server.
Because of the automatic failover, our site was down for less than three minutes. The last time we had a similar hardware error, our site recovery time was three hours, said Ortiz. It was a stressful situation, since the crisis occurred during one of our heaviest traffic times on our site. Classmates foresees the expansion of its server size as its online business matures. As our company grows, we will need to expand our hardware and software requirements, Ortiz said.