They face the customers and handle all the browsing, shopping, searching and other functions. Hardware load balancing ensures that traffic is directed to the most available servers so customers never have to wait for a response. ReadyCache locates commonly accessed information on servers throughout the country so that they are closer to users. This improves site responsiveness and makes for a better customer experience. In working with Microsoft to build the overall site, the company decided to deploy Windows 2000 in strategic parts of the infrastructure.
Any Web site is heavy on the browse end of the spectrum.
With Windows 2000, we saw a dramatic increase in performance. We were able to handle roughly double the number of concurrent users per server. The first areas to upgrade will be the search and SSL environments, with the entire site moving over soon thereafter. EPIC allows the processor to handle many more operations at the same time, thereby keeping ahead of today's most demanding e-Business applications. What's more, the Itanium processor can directly address far more memory than previous 32-bit processors.