What problems did Tractor Supply Company (TSC) have with IT system scalability?
Townsend: We were a Sun shop five years ago, running Solaris. Those machines are very expensive to keep up, so we moved our data warehouse to Intel in a Windows environment. We started running Windows NT on Pentium Pro 4-way servers. We outgrew that box quickly. We upgraded to a 4-way Xeon server. Eighteen months later, we outgrew that. Then, we got eight-processor Intel SMP servers running Oracle8i on Windows and Veritas Cluster Server to handle the workload. This approach was not only costly, but also resulted in unacceptable administration costs. So, every 18 months, we had to throw out a server and get the latest and greatest. That’s a lot of hassle just for scalability, not to mention that fact that we couldn’t achieve sufficient failover with WinTel. What alternative solutions did you consider? Townsend: Originally we considered a failover cluster for redundancy. We thought about going into big Unix, but that was very cost-prohibitive. We wanted to stay with the Intel architectur
