| Highwinds Software Product Documentation: Typhoon, Twister, Tornado, Hurricane, and Cyclone | ||
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From any perspective, building and running a Usenet network is costly. The goal of any business that provides Usenet is to provide a solution that is as reliable and cost-effective as possible. Getting the most value per dollar on hardware, software and network is of utmost importance and Highwinds Software products are developed with such goals in mind. Highwinds Software has forged into new ground and solved yet another problem facing purveyors of Usenet. Tornado is server software to maximize your Usenet investment.
Tornado is Usenet server software designed to allow spool sharing among many Usenet Reader Servers. The issue of spool sharing has always been a hot topic in the Usenet community since spools to store articles require significant storage (usually in the form of RAID arrays). The more storage a Reader Server has, the more articles it can store. Since Usenet traffic is over 1TB of new data every day, storage costs inflate quickly.
A problem arises when a provider would like to expand their Usenet offering. While a bigger, more capable server can temporarily solve the problem of servicing more customers; I/O, network, software and hardware limits eventually thwart even the grandest of design schemes and the provider must add additional servers to handle the intense load of Usenet customers. Often times, doubling capacity requires doubling spool storage as well. Spool storage is by far the largest capital expenditure of an initial Usenet rollout.
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