The latter provides a framework for companies wishing to develop Web-based products and delivery mechanisms, while protecting their investment in their legacy systems. At Discover, Sun servers provide the hardware backbone, managing the Web transactions, business logic and relational database. The application enables Discover clients to go to a Web site such as Microsoft Investor and download information not only from their brokerage account, but also from their accounts with banks and mortgage companies. They can combine all their financial activities in a single view. As MacIlwaine sees it, there are three basic elements of system design that no company can overlook today and hope to succeed tomorrow.
Availability heads the list.
Next comes reliability. Discover has just unveiled a parallel data center, based on Sun technology, in Utah. But this center is not simply for disaster recovery. It processes transactions simultaneously with the San Francisco site, balancing the load between the two. That is much easier to handle if you have multiple data centers and it is more economical.