InvestorsEdge is powered by Microsoft and Hewlett Packard! From our NT Servers and Microsoft Internet Information Servers that feed you the HTML (web pages), to the SQL server that powers the back-end, we are a Microsoft shop.
Our static-page server - WWW.IRNET.COM - is a dual Pentium 100 with 1GB FDD and 128MB RAM. We are running Microsoft Internet Information Server on NT Server 3.51. WWW houses all of the "static" pages and Java applets. Until recently, every page on InvestorsEdge, with the exception of the homepage, was dynamically generated by the database. We changed this when performance became an issue. Now we have individual "static" pages for stock and fund request, portfolio login, clients, and portfolio setup.
The brains behind InvestorsEdge, SERVER1.IRNET.COM, is a Hewlett Packard NetServer 5/133 LS2. It's a three way Pentium 133 with 128MB RAM and three 2GB hard drives running Microsoft NT 3.51, the SQL Server, and a second Internet Information Server. This HP NetServer provides excellent network throughput and disk redundancy through the use of NT disk mirroring.
Finally, a single pentium machine is responsible for collecting data from Data Broadcasting and sending it to the SQL Server.
When CGI requests are made to WWW or SERVER1, they are relayed to the SQL Server on SERVER1 via a named pipes network. SERVER1 receives the stock request from WWW and then pulls the requested information from the appropriate table. The appropriate DB Library is then executed to take the data and form it into HTML. The HTML is then passed back via CGI to the Web server (either machine), and back to the end user. The libraries and scripts were all developed by Ethos, Inc.