By Iqbal Khan
The old adage 'time is money' is especially true for today's retailers relying on their advanced information systems and server farms. As systems' response times increases, so does a retailer's productivity and revenue. Unfortunately, the vastly increasing system users and transactions play an adverse role in meeting these ends.
For example, consider payment processing and POS systems. With a payment processing system, retailers have a short and limited window of time during the night to process customer payments and transfer of funds. When they have tens of millions of customers, processing all these payments as fast as possible becomes a major issue due to this limited window of time at night.
To alleviate the problem, retailers try to add more payment processing servers, but they are unable to add more database servers proportionately due to architectural constraints in their system. Therefore, retailers reach a scalability bottleneck with the database and adding more payment processing servers making matters worse.
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