8.3. The Solution

After considering several application-server implementations, Altura chose to rearchitect its site around HP Bluestone Total-e-Server, the company's J2EE-technology based application-server foundation. Altura developers rewrote the multivendor, multilanguage, multicurrency shopping cart and other core business technologies in the Java programming language and built a new production architecture around Total-e-Server.

8.3.1. Benefits of the HP Bluestone Implementation of J2EE

HP Bluestone Total-e-Server builds on the J2EE specification to deliver linear scalability, customer-facing fault tolerance, high-transaction reliability, and greatly increased performance to Altura and its sites. Because of Total-e-Server's implementation of the J2EE platform, individual physical servers can handle hundreds of user sessions—a dramatic improvement over the 15 to 20 sessions the old architecture allowed. This increase in performance—on the same Windows NT server-based systems Altura had always used—enables the company to reduce its Web-server farm from more than 120 servers to fewer than 30. In addition, Total-e-Server provides Altura with a single management console from which Altura's IT personnel can manage all their servers from one location. Again, that represents a significant improvement over the use of 120 separate consoles and custom-built software to track the health of each application.