"Eryk Szachniewicz, software development manager for the Santa Barbara, Calif.-based chain, said the 25-year-old company began shopping for new IT systems in 2006 after concluding the existing Netware transaction servers were too slow and too close to capacity and its Windows application servers were too unreliable.
""When a main server crashes, we have 2,000 users waiting to get back online," Szachniewicz said. "It's very unpleasant."
"La Curacao's two clustered transaction servers, only one of which is active at a time, are the heart of the 100-server system for the ten-store chain in California and Arizona. Collectively, they process more than 25 million transactions a year, including sales, inventory and accounting, he said. The transaction servers, which back up one another, in turn are linked to two application servers and the EMC Clariion CX 500 external storage drives, which house La Curacao's InterSystems database. The servers themselves are the operating engine that performs the actual processing."
