Design partner for hug amounts of db connections and data?

I am new to J2EE and I have a question to the more experienced architects here. I would like to build an application based on a J2EE server that will regularly poll multiple databases from different manufactures over the network or the Internet (could be several 1000) and save this data in a central database. This would mean that a full-scale application could receive hug amount of data in bursts or sent on an e2e fashion. For a web shop type of application there is the MVC architecture but is there a design partner for this type of problem where I need to handle hug amounts of db connections and data?

Any help or suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

[689 byte] By [donqueue] at [2007-9-27 4:45:49]