While we like to refer to ourselves as GATE Village, as that talks about the community that we believe we are, our full corporate name is GATE: Global Alliance of Trusted Experts Inc. and part of that trust is, we believe, the TRUST our members put in our EXPERTESE to assure solid service. To that end and coincident with a move to a new data centre, we are pleased to announce a major upgrade in technology that will allow our existing communities to continue to scale out, as well as add support for additional communities.

While our present servers have proven very effective at delivering a speedy solution, providing sub-second response to virtually 100% of unauthenticated (visitor) requests and averaging approximately 1.2 seconds for most authenticated requests, they are a family of servers that do not allow more than 4GB of RAM. Now, GATE Village is great technology based on PHP, it offers features and functions far superior to virtually any other web community, but it does so at a high cost of RAM utilization. Our 4GB machines are reaching capacity, occasionally maxing out the RAM and wishing they had more, and while we deploy memcached to augment the memory using other servers, there is far too much that is not cacheable to make that much of a scalable solution.

Our next generation servers not only see a processor upgrade from dual-core to quad-core technology, they also come deployed with 24GB of RAM each. Our goal is to run all communities within RAM at all times so that we can provide speedy, and perhaps more importantly, predictable transactional time. The abundance of RAM means that we'll be able to make very efficient use of the CPU resources, meaning superior cost:performance ... added to that the fact that we purchased on very favourable end-of-year deals and we believe we have a highly competitive advantage over "virtualized" services that we intend to continue to pass on to our members in the way of low cost and high service as they have come to expect from us.

For those true IT purchasing geeks like myself, these are rack mounted servers that we purchased for cheaper than the less capable matching tower units! I'm trying to think of the last time I have seen rack servers even go on sale, let alone beat the price of towers! It was like a Christmas present just for us :-) And this shipment didn't arrive 1 week late but over one week early! Seems everything is aligned for good things to occur....our year anniversary approaches and we are in such great shape for that milestone!