by Hi...
I've just been named webmaster of my company's site and need some help
getting a fix on a couple (of hundred) things. I'm experienced with NT
and UNIX and do programming in C, Perl and Visual Basic, but I haven't
been involved with the web part of it before, so bear with me.
Here's the situation:
We're a newspaper and our newsfeed accounts for about one third of our
site content. The rest is locally generated content about lifestyles,
entertainment, contests, real estate, etc.
We currently have a 200 mhz dual-processor Pentium Pro with 192 MB of
ram running Netscape Enterprise 3 on RAID Level 5. It's also running a
number of VB applications that parse local news content and calendar
data from our news database (Sybase 10 on Solaris). Most of this is
turned into plain vanilla html files, but the calendar stuff is broken
down and stored in SQL Server 6.5 Enterprise where it can be retrieved
in the form of custom calendars via a Tango 3 application.
At one time we were hosting this at our location with the help of a
group of consultants, who wrote the VB code. There was so much down
time due to crashes that we turned to an outside host and now use our
server as a staging area.
We just upgraded our news database and I have inherited a
four-processor Sparc 10 with 256 MB of RAM.
Here's my question:
We would like to resume hosting this site ourselves. Would it be
feasible to keep using the NT server as a staging area and then post
everything to the Sparc 10, which would host it?
By doing this, we think we would gain fault tolerance without having
to rebuild the site from scratch on UNIX. Tango makes an application
server for Solaris that could handle all of our current Tango content,
so that shouldn't be a problem.
Any thoughts or suggestions will be much appreciated.