Installation Scenarios

Spectrum™ Technology Platform supports a variety of installation scenarios that scale to fit the needs of your organization.

Standard

The standard scenario is the simplest installation scenario. You install Spectrum™ Technology Platform on a single server. All activity is handled by this one server, including designing dataflows, storage of configuration information, running jobs, and handling service requests.



Remote Servers

Remote servers are useful if you have licensed many modules. To use remote servers, you install Spectrum™ Technology Platform on several different servers, installing different modules on each server. You then configure the individual services to execute on one of the remote servers. This approach has the following advantages:
  • Improved performance, especially for web service and API calls. For jobs, there may be some performance improvement, but the time it takes to send data across the network to the remote server may offset any performance gains.
  • Ability to perform database updates on individual modules without interrupting the availability of other modules. For example, if you need to update a postal database for the Universal Addressing Module, you could install the update by stopping just the remote server handling the Universal Addressing Module, allowing other modules to remain available on other remote servers.
  • Startup time can be reduced. With all modules on one server, it can take a long time for the server to start up. With modules installed on separate servers, each server will start up more quickly.


Cluster

In a clustered environment, processing is shared among two or more instances of the server. All communication with Spectrum™ Technology Platform goes through a load balancer. Instead of using the URL and port of the Spectrum™ Technology Platform server, you use the URL and port of the load balancer. Consider using this approach if you require failover redundancy and high-volume, high-performance processing.

This diagram illustrates the cluster architecture:



This approach has the following advantages:

  • Processing is automatically distributed among the nodes in the cluster for optimal performance.
  • Configuration settings are automatically synchronized across nodes.
  • Uptime can be improved since if a node goes down the other nodes remain available to handle processing requests.
  • Adding a new node is easy.

Cluster with Separated Configuration Database

When you install the Spectrum™ Technology Platform server you are installing two things: server software and a configuration database. The server handles the execution of jobs and service requests, reporting, and logging. The configuration database stores data such as users and roles, data connections, dataflows, and the audit log.

For clusters consisting of only a few nodes, installing the server and configuration database together on the same server provides acceptable performance. However, a cluster that consists of a large number of nodes may have its performance negatively affected by having a copy of the configuration database on each node. This is because an increasing number of nodes results in increased data replication between nodes during synchronization. Performance may also suffer if users are accessing the configuration database frequently through activities such as editing dataflows or job schedules. These activities require processing power, resulting in less CPU capacity available for running jobs and responding to service requests.

If you have an implementation with four or more nodes, you should consider installing the configuration database to separate servers. This is the most scalable installation scenario because you can add nodes without necessarily adding another instance of the configuration database. For example, say you have five nodes and three configuration database servers. You could add another five nodes, bringing the total number of nodes to 10, while still using just the three configuration databases to support all 10 nodes.

Installing the configuration database to a separate server has the following advantages:
  • More CPU is available to the server for running jobs, process flows, and service requests because reading and writing to the configuration database is handled by a separate server.
  • Reduced network traffic due to reduced configuration data replicated between nodes. For example, you could have five Spectrum™ Technology Platform servers for handling execution while having only three repositories. With just three repositories instead of five, data only needs to replicate between three servers rather than five.
  • Most scalable installation scenario.