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Acme Enterprises, a mid-size company with 1500 employees, has a strong e-commerce presence on the Internet. Their environment consists of several geographically dispersed web server farms and database servers. Several internally developed applications are employed on the web servers as content gateway interface (CGI) applications, providing interaction between user input and back-end database processing. Over the last 18 months, Acme has experienced significant growth in its online purchasing operations. Statistics collected over the eighteen-month period indicated a 33% increase in web site visitor traffic. The increased load is driven throughout the entire system thus affecting every part of Acme’s web environment. Database transactions have experienced similar growth creating scaling issues equal to that of the front-end web servers. To date, Acme has employed traditional scaling methods in an attempt to keep pace with increasing demands. These methods include the purchase and deployment of larger enterprise-class RISC processor servers, thereby scaling vertically. The concept of vertical scaling is readily apparent in the database back-end element of their architecture. Acme currently employs 2 Sun Fire 6800 servers, ea