The site uses eight clustered ProLiant 1850 series Web servers and two application servers, which, along with BizTalk and XML, have helped ease communication problems the site was having between legacy and outside systems. The SQL Server units are built on Compaq ProLiant 5500 with 36.4 GB drives. With the analytics and data warehousing we wanted plenty of room. Although configuration was a key challenge, once we had that done it ran like a champ. With Compaq, reliability is now extraordinary.
Nothing goes to production until it goes through the other two.
Chiarelli's team is storing every user session so the site can serve up customer-specific, relevant information online. We're 30 to 60 days out from that and the advanced analytics are a little further out. Starbucks launched its first e-commerce site back in 1998. After the Christmas 1999 season, the company realized it needed to grow with its increasing online customer demands, so it decided to add more features and functionality by the fall of 2000. Around this time, Microsoft was also looking to demo Commerce Server 2000 to its customers.