Your company has decided to stand up a brand-new, web-accessible service. The service will involve a web front-end and a big database server back-end. This is an entirely new service, so Acme is planning to buy all new hardware to make this work. The expectation is that the service will, during business hours, be dealing with about 1,000 requests per minute. It will be accessible all over the world (unless censored by a location). An average request will require 5 database operations involving, on average, about 100 Mbytes of data.

What are some of the performance considerations for this site? How much hardware power do you need? What duty cycle must you support, i.e., out of 168 hours a week, for how many do you expect high demand?