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Chapter 3. Client/Server Can Mean Multiple Servers
While FlowMark is a client/server tool, do not limit your thinking and design to a
single server. You should consider capacity and performance in your design, and
there are times when you will need multiple servers to achieve your goals,
particularly if you are designing something larger than a departmental system. You
may need to ask this question: “How many servers, and of what kind, do I need to
achieve my business requirements?” Do not inhibit your design by thinking: “How
do I constrain my design so it works on a single machine?” In today's world of
constantly improving price/performance, hardware may not be as significant an
impact on the overall cost of a project as it once was. Investigate the cost
implications and approach the topic with an open mind.
If you intend to start with a single server, but expect over time to add more users or
more applications to your workflow platform, make sure you plan and design with
the concept of multiple servers in mind. How will you divide the work between
servers? Will you have a different set of users per server, with some people in
each set capable of performing all activities for each process run on that server?
Will you want to eventually move part of a process to a different server while
keeping the “main part” on a current server, thus requiring use of a subprocess?
This planning will make it much easier later when you add additional servers.
Consider the concept of a red team, a white team, and a blue team, each with its
own server, each independently running the same process template, doing the
same kind of work. Or perhaps you prefer different servers with different types of
users doing different processes or subprocesses. Perhaps your application calls for
regional servers serving local offices, running a process that under some
circumstances needs to run a subprocess for headquarters approval. You could
have two or more regional servers, each with its set of users doing the local
activities, and a single headquarters server where that staff does the tasks in the
approval subprocesses for all regions.
3.1 Multiple Server Options with FlowMark V2.3
FlowMark supports servers with OS/2, Windows NT, AIX and HP-Unix operating
systems. The OS/2 and NT platforms give some range of scalability within the
hardware where it runs. AIX gives you a step up in performance and capacity and
a broad scale of available hardware in the RS/6000 family. You can start small and
step up in platforms (even change operating systems) with little effort. This
involves a change of servers, but there is no change required in your process
models; they can be moved as is. Also, there is no change required on your client
workstations. Both server environments support all client environments.
If a single server is not the solution to do your job, what are the options available
with FlowMark V2.3?
Simply divide the work. Have different server machines, with different
databases and FlowMark servers for subsets of the users. Divide the users by
teams, by organizations, by location. You will need to have a mix of users on
each server machine so that all activities in the processes you want to run on
that server can be completed by the users there. This could influence your
process design.
Copyright IBM Corp. 1996, 1998 5