>The company I work for has a very successful e-commerce site that uses West-Winds Web Connect Pkg on NT4/IIS and accesses Foxpro tables on a Netware Server. Our Netware server has experienced some disk subsystem failures lately that bring it down for several hours. The Raid Level 5 setup on the Netware server doesn't seem to be working like it should. As the web site is becoming mission critical to the company we have been thinking about minimizing our downtime. I was hoping some of the more experienced people here have been down this road before and can shares some of their experiences. All options are open such as ditching the Netware and using Load balancing/Hot Spares using W2K Advanced Server (Rick Strahl's article in Code Magazine was very informative). Ideally every part of the system should have some redundancy available. I see the data table redundancy being the more difficult part to engineer. Please discuss.

Chris,

I'm in something of the same kind of situation though I'm on the front end and am designing as much redundancy as is possible beforehand. Ed Rauh will be a great source for redundancy issues such as mirroring and duplexing and striping (I'd do all of them if I could). Rick Strahl's article on load balancing is very well written. The only thing left is the back end and our plans are to use VFP in between the web interface and a backend SQL server data repository. I anticipate having two separate SQL boxes and implementing an online live data duplication using the SQL engine.