Recommendations for upscaling

[sublimino]

Hello,

I work for a small business running accounting and business management
software (SaaS) on a single busy server, and we are planning to
upscale to multiple servers. Having synchronous data is vital. In
light of this:

Is it possible for a replicated server to be synchronous?
Are slaves run on hardware that is identical to the master?
Can anybody recommend Continuent's middleware?

Apologies for cross posting to the replication and cluster lists.

Many thanks,


Andrew Martin