Database environment backup and system configuration

Hi, Informix guru, I've been designing trading system handling both real time data and interactive user input data. The real time feed data is coming from some remote place and without stop, while the interactive user input data is coming from some application tools provided, user input has to refer to the real time data as well. Both data are critical and performance is an important issue. Our current configuration is two HP710/100 running Informix online version 5.04. To balance the load we have them running for different departments and backup each other. We are facing database administration, performance and environment backup problems. One proposal is to have a really powerful mechine as the server handling only the acessing of the Informix database. Having other processes running on some less powerful workstations. This might solve our general database administration problem, but the rest of the problems is still unsolved. The nature of the processes is: when there is no trade, every process is kind of sleeping, but when there are trades happening, every process will try to access system resources to get the most recent data and work on it. The resource request diagram is full of sharp peaks. My questions are: 1. With one mechine as a central database server, will it be a bottle neck and badly affect the performance? What kind of configuration is suitable, multiple DB server to serve each department separately or single DB server to server all department? What is a good way to balancing the load, especially between there is trade and there is not trade? 2. What is a good way to have a reliable backup? The backup here needs not only the data backup, but also the environment, which means if any failure (database failure, process failure, or mechine failure) happends, there will be a backup environment where users may reconnect to and continue their normal activities. Since the real time data is out of the control, the backup environment should be available at the time of any failure. Thanks in advance for any advice, sugguestion, comment. Wendy