Coming Soon - A Faster ToolBarn

We've heard the complaints about our site being slow at times. We're stepping up to the plate and upgrading the web servers and the database backend to try and make this less of a problem. We're buying more than we need to handle future growth and have everything planned so we can expand upon the technology as our needs grow. What's that entail? Lots.

1) Load Balancers
If you are interested in learning a bit about them, you can read a bit here. They're not exactly power tools, but they are powerful and are tools for making our site highly available.

2) Web Servers
We're upgrading from a single web server to 3. If you'd like to know some of the specs (for the geeky types out there), I've spelled it out here. ...started (our blogs are moved and testing more right now)...

3) Database Servers
Again, we're going from a single server to 2 with clustering. Specifics on the hardware can be found here.

4) Mail Servers
Since email is a necessary evil in doing business online, we're moving it from our web server to a dedicated machine with fail-over. Sorry, no specifics here.

5) Switches
Connecting all of these will be interesting. We ordered 2 Dell Gigabit managed switches to handle the connections - 1 for each NIC on most of these machines.

We'll be hooking all this up into different power grids with flywheel backup, and no piece of equipment will be without a backup / redundant machine. Of course, we also have our Google Mini for our search results, so we'll have 9 servers in our cabinet when it's all said and done. All this because someone said it took too long for a page to come up. I love technology. :-)