As my colleague John Wangaard mentioned in an earlier post, Four51 maintains a variety of fishing lures to support online ordering. (Minnesotans of Scandinavian descent can create a fishing simile out of anything, including e-commerce.) I’ve been asked to write a few lines about the jointed blue Rapala, AKA the production environment. (Four51 maintains separate production, demo, staging, quality assurance and test environments.)

As John went on to say, the Four51 production application is like bread and butter. (Minnesotans of Scandinavian descent can create a dairy simile out of anything, including e-commerce.) Every 18 seconds a new Buyer-user is created on Four51 and they, along with existing users, ordered more than 60 million units last month using that one environment. Indeed, the Production Environment is where the action is!

With that being said, the production application servers work hard. They are responsible for supporting user authentication, serving web page requests, hosting the Four51 interoperability web and XML services, and sending Four51 system messages. We have a lot going on every day to keep all of these systems working happily together.

The Four51 application is also supported by a number of servers running specialized imaging applications (Pageflex Mpower). These imaging servers have been designed as a fault-tolerant/load balancing solution and each server can be used to assume additional workload at any time should one of the other servers suffer a hardware failure or be taken down for maintenance.

As Four51 usage goes steadily and rapidly upward, so does the workload placed on the production environment. The team at Four51 monitors each piece of hardware for performance which allows for pro-active action when additional hardware is needed to keep everything running smoothly.

Where does this impressive hardware reside? At the Visi Data Center in St. Paul, MN, which is a lot like Fort Knox except harder to get into. Visit the Visi website to learn about SAS 70 Type II Certification and other advanced security protocols like 3-token authentication. This is something we take pride in and if I were part of the Four51 network out selling my company’s e-commerce capabilities, especially in sectors like branch banking, I’d spend plenty of time on infrastructure scalability and security.

Jim

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