NeoSpire first helped in the beta environment. While United e-Way's development team was finishing the application for first launch, NeoSpire was busy designing the application's robust, secure server cluster environment. During its final beta testing, the application needed to be tested on the final cluster environment within the development team's offices. NeoSpire worked with the United e-Way development team at the development team's office and built the server cluster in the beta environment. Once the application was ready to go live, NeoSpire migrated the server cluster into its own data center.

NeoSpire's first goal with this application was security. The information being stored was highly sensitive employee data from major corporations including Sprint, Qwest and Coke. All information had to be isolated to the system and only accessible from the outside by secure means. The NeoSpire team put two networks in place to segregate the database and application networks from each other. This included a public network, that allowed the outside world to interact with the application, and a private network that allowed only the servers to communicate with one another. The solution limited the exposure of the web servers to only the necessary ports, kept externally accessible IP addresses off of the web servers, and eliminated the ability of an outsider to gain direct access to the United-eWay servers.

NeoSpire's second goal was to maintain a consistent and reliable system that would be available 24/7 to accept thousands of simultaneous donations. To achieve this goal the multi server cluster was comprised of a Web/application layer and a database layer. The Web/application layer used round-robin load balancing to ensure that no single web server would receive all the requests while the others maintained an idle state. The database layer used an active/passive cluster configuration implemented via Microsoft Clustering Service (MCS). The database servers were SCSI attached to a storage expansion unit that was populated with multiple 18GB drives and online hot spares in case of failure. There were also multiple "utility" boxes needed for the application including two domain controllers and a mail server.

The NeoSpire administrators currently manage all hardware and software up through and including the application layer. This includes all monitoring, using our proprietary Web-based monitoring tool known as WatchTower, of OS and application performance, systems and services. NeoSpire's team also performs the upgrade of all OS patches, logfile management, data backup, recovery procedures and offsite storage of backups. NeoSpire is responsible for all security and firewall services, performance reporting as well as all technical decisions concerning the design, implementation and deployment of the servers. During heavy campaign sessions the NeoSpire team watches over the system to triple check and make sure everything is function.

In the fall of 2001, more than 70,000 donors from 180 companies throughout the country raised nearly $20 million using the United-eWay Online Pledge Processing System. The United eWay campaigns consisted of several national and regional campaigns with one company alone uploading 64,000 employee records representing employees in 48 states.

United-eWay has been so satisfied and successful that they have decided to upgrade the application using Microsoft's .Net application, double the size of the cluster within NeoSpire and have the NeoSpire team manage the .Net environment.