The Design Pillars of the Physical Perspective - Architecture Advanced Design and Setup Guide - Foundation 24.1 - Foundation 24.1 - Ready - Perceptive Content - external

Architecture Advanced Design and Setup Guide

Platform
Perceptive Content
Product
Architecture Advanced Design and Setup Guide
Release
Foundation 24.1
License

Pillar Description
Flexibility OSM Deployment

You can deploy the OSM on a SAN or a third-party hierarchical storage management (HSM) system, or other storage options, such as optical disk or tape.

Supported Operating Systems

The Perceptive Content Server runs on a variety of operating systems, including Microsoft Windows and Linux.

Supported DBMSs

Perceptive Content allows customers to choose from Oracle and Microsoft relational DBMSs.

Functionality Database Encryption (database supported)

Perceptive Content supports database encryption, which is a feature of the relational DBMS.

Transport Encryption

Perceptive Content can provide encrypted, port-level access to authenticated users via 256-bit AES encryption, which encrypts the Perceptive Content TCP/IP client and server socket communication.

Network Communications

To provide greater efficiency over various network topologies, Perceptive Software developed an efficient communications subsystem called “Tri-state Intelligent Sockets,” or TSIS™, to provide fast processing between the Perceptive Content Client pool and the Perceptive Content Server. TSIS bursts packets efficiently between the Perceptive Content Client pool and the Perceptive Content Server, enabling the Perceptive Content Server to service client requests in volumes beyond what would ever be experienced in the real world. The Perceptive Content TSIS ensures that Perceptive Content Clients experience no delays, optimizes load handling, and provides users with sub-second content retrieval.

Usability Security

The physical perspective of Perceptive Content shows an important usability factor, which is security. Your physical network provides security through features and encryption techniques available by the network, database, and OSM storage solution, as well as within the product security features of Perceptive Content.

Scalability 64-Bit Support

To provide improved performance and additional memory capacity, you can install Perceptive Content Server in a 64-bit Windows environment.

OSM Deployment

You can use a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) level-5 system or an object-specific storage system to store the OSM, a third-party hierarchical storage management (HSM) system, or EMC Centera to store OSM data. All of these options are scalable as your capacity needs grow.

Clustering

For load-balancing, you can cluster the database server or OSM storage device on their respective servers. The hardware on which the database or OSM runs provides the clustering functionality.

DBMS

The Perceptive Content Server works with Oracle and SQL Server relational DBMSs. Each of these options is scalable, as proven by their manufacturer.

Extensibility Distributed Design

The core functionality the Perceptive Content Server delivers to end users can be centralized or distributed. This design enables your company to scan, process content, index, and view documents in one location or across remote locations. Additionally, you can distribute Perceptive Content Client components across servers in your enterprise, according to what best meets your needs and your environment.

Dependability Network Standards

Because Perceptive Content is a pure TCP/IP-based product, it offers the highest level of raw network performance and the greatest breadth of back-end scalability.

Backup

Perceptive Software recommends that you perform a full backup of the Perceptive Content object store and database on a nightly basis, or more often depending on your transaction load. For more information about maintaining your system and DBMS, refer to Perceptive Content Best Practices for Oracle or Perceptive Content Best Practices for Microsoft SQL Server.

Active-Active server environment

With Perceptive Content 6.7, you can install and configure Perceptive Content Server as an active-active environment (also known as a high-availability environment). Perceptive Content Server is installed as an instance – with copies of files, databases and so on – on a physical server. In its simplest form, an active-active server environment has at least two Perceptive Content instances running at the same time, a primary instance and a secondary instance; however, each instance of the Perceptive Content Server runs independently of the other. If the primary environment fails, there is no interruption when the system immediately switches over to the secondary environment without the need for a server-application restart.

Failover Support

A failover server can be particularly beneficial to customers using Perceptive Content across their enterprise in support of critical business processes. With the execution of a failover license agreement, you can create a failover instance of the Perceptive Content Server.

In addition, Perceptive Content supports the ability to configure both a redundant object store and a redundant metadata repository, to ensure 100% data availability in case of a media failure. You can mirror the OSM to provide failover support in the event the file system for the primary OSM fails, while you use third party data/server mirroring tools to mirror all server resource and document objects to a separate server instance in the event the primary Perceptive Content Server goes down. Customers can take advantage of relational DBMS replication capabilities to create a real-time, redundant metadata repository on another server instance.

Load Balancing and Failover

The Perceptive Content Server Agents and companion products are remotable, meaning that you can install them independently on other servers. This achieves efficient load balancing across multiple CPUs and protects processing bandwidth on the Perceptive Content Server. For example, the database can be loaded on one server, the user load on another server, and the Perceptive Content supporting agents on one or more additional servers.

High Availability

Perceptive Content uses a pure IP transport between client and server. An IP connection from a client application to its corresponding server application is a key requirement for any application to server to work successfully in a high-availability architecture. Because the high-availability tool transparently migrates the IP address of the application service to whichever node it is currently running on, Perceptive Content can be transparently accessed on any server in a cluster.

Perceptive Content requires no special configuration options outside of most highavailability tools. The various Perceptive Content services that are part of the cluster are simply managed in that cluster using standard administrative tools.