Please help me with a conceptual networking question

[DannyJ7]

Hello,

I do not have a lot of networking experience, but I need to research networking solutions for a large project.

The situation is as follows: A large employee database (let's say 50,000 employees) already exists and is fully functional. If I want to create an online system for employees to access their payroll records, I need to have a general idea of what hardware and software is required.

From my basic understanding, I assume that the new system would not run on the same system as the existing database, right? It would be necessary to deploy new hardware to run the employee interface and to retrieve data from the database as per employee requests, correct? I assume a web server would be necessary for this. I think something like a C# program utilizing ASP.NET would be appropriate for handling employee login and retrieving database info via SQL.

What is confusing me most is the hardware requirement. Let's say that these 50,000 employees are logging into the system from different geographic locations, that's quite a lot of users. What type of server would be able to handle this volume of requests? I'm a bit lost here, so could someone please clue me in as to what might be a viable hardware solution?

Sorry if I sound dumb!

Thanks!

[johnwill]

Sounds like final exams.