Planning for Growth
Your initial site design should take future expansion into account. A well-planned site can expand, or scale, cost-effectively to accommodate increased site traffic while maintaining performance.
To plan for the future growth of your site, you should divide your site architecture into two broad layers: front-end Web servers, and back-end systems where data is stored and your business-processing systems are located. Each of these layers may be subdivided into multiple tiers to match the projected growth pattern for your site. Because Commerce Server 2000 is flexible, you can choose an architecture that best suits your needs.
You typically scale the back end first by scaling vertically — that is, by upgrading the server and adding mass storage. Then, you can also subdivide the data layer by function among two or more servers. For example, the Commerce Server Data Warehouse could be placed on one server, and the database for storing profile information on another. With Commerce Server, you can divide functions onto different servers during setup, or do it later using Commerce Server Manager. For very large sites, individual databases can be partitioned onto multiple servers.
The following table lists some of the questions that you need to answer in planning for growth.
| Planning question | Recommendation |
| What site architecture best meets your requirements for increasing your capacity over time? | Review the usage scenario configuration information provided in the Commerce Server 2000 Resource Kit. Select a configuration that best meets your needs. |
| How will you increase your site capacity as usage requirements increase? | Plan a scaling path for each type of server, each network connection, and each Commerce Server function. This path should include your plan for scaling the site when specified thresholds (such as number of concurrent users, memory usage, or disk usage) are reached. |