Partnership Needed

Dear Sirs, We are an Only-Online travel agency in Florence, Italy and we deal with reservations throughout all Europe This are the current fugures of CharmingEscapes.com (our online travel agency): 7.000 user sessions a day 80.000 pageviews a day 4.000 e-mails (received + fowarded) a day 17.000 unique reservations a year 3.500 invoices issued (towards hotels, for commissions on reservations) 670 properties online (hotels, villas, castles, and so on) Publications: www.Tuscany.net www.CharmingParis.com www.CharmingRome.com www.CharmingFlorence.com www.CharmingVenice.com www.CharmingItaly.com www.CharmingLondon.com Due to the enormous growth of our business, our numbers will be AT LEAST 5 times bigger in 2 years of time. And we have a HUGE bottle-neck: TECHNOLOGY. In every web company technology is a factor that helps companies to better develop their business. In our case, technology not only is neutral (doesn't help the business), but is, on the contrary, a PROBLEM that is REALLY, ACTUALLY SLOWING OUR GROWTH. *****OUR CURRNET PLATFORM (one single dedicated server at verio.com)********** Linux RedHat 6.2 Dual Pentium III 700Mhz 1 Gbyte RAM 2 HD SCSI 9GB (RAID-1) 2 HD SCSI 18GB (Backup) ************************** *******THE BIG GOAL**** We need to build and re-engineer a system/application/database structure that will allow us to scale with no problem, and that will support us in the next developments of our business (statistics, new functionalities of the system and so on). *********************** I'm exploring ALL the possible ways: so far I have asked: Oracle guys Sun Bea-WebLogic Vignette and everyone was of course shooting against the open source platform we are using now. With you I'd like to explore the "most dangerous way" as they call it. What if we try to scale with our systems?? I mean: LINUX on INTEL (1, 2, 3, n machines, but all linux or opensource O/S anyway) PERL, PHP, (open source) MySQL as database We would need to: 1- Build a new system architecture: 2 servers? Mirrored? clustered? one application server (runs all perl+php+sendmail processes) and one database server? 2- Re-design the architecture of the database. Now everytime we are making a query (view by tracking number, view by holiday maker, view messages by accommodation and so on), we are starting a scan on a ***350MBytes**** table, and it takes hours. What if we indexed some fileds? I'd like to know if you could give a positive help in order to design and optimize the performance of the Scripts (PHP), the System Architecture and the Probramming language to be used. Will you be able/willing to have a strong partnership with CharmingEscapes.com on this big, big project? If this could interest you (we have the budget), I'm willing to call you for a deeper analysis of the problem. As I said, this s the biggest decision we must take for our business: do we link with Oracle for life? do we link with IBM for life? do we try the Open Source way? Thanks for your help, Stefano Galastri President & CEO CharmingEscapes.com sg@sia.nu Tel: +39 335 8056569