For example, you may be surfing CNN, reading a review of your favorite author's latest book when, somehow, an ad from a bookseller offering that exact book appears on your screen. This system gives Be Free's associated merchants access to millions of potential affiliates, and guarantees that affiliates will receive content that is relevant to its customers. Since its founding, Be Free has experienced exponential growth-and all the ups and downs that come along with it. On the downside, the volume of network traffic and transaction loading generated by these partnerships has taken a toll on Be Free's infrastructure. Because our infrastructure is responsible for a significant percentage of our customers' sales, our customers expect us to have the highest availability in the industry.
Scalability is also a key concern, given the company's dramatic growth.
Within each tier, logic is deployed as multiple instances of objects on multiple servers. This design permits Be Free to increase capacity by adding servers to any tier. The first tier is the client, typically a Web browser. In addition, Be Free's ISP offers connectivity to five different networks to guarantee that there will always be an available path between any node on the Internet and Be Free's server farm. The third tier consists of a variety of Web and application servers, all of which are based on Sun Microsystems technology.