EM3 iOn system requirements and deployment planning

EM3 iOn™ (information object network) is designed to deliver enterprise-class functionality, scalability, and reliability while still providing a low total cost of ownership. There are several components to this client-server application as described below.

Content administrators access a Web-based application (iOn Admin) using Internet Explorer or any Mozilla-based Web browser. The admin server also serves as a staging environment for all the sites being managed with iOn.

The iOn Admin application stores information in the file system and in a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or Oracle database. This database can either reside on the Admin/Staging server, a dedicated staging database server, or a shared production database server or database cluster, depending on your load requirements.

A separate application (iOn Site) resides on a single production server or server farm. This application dynamically serves content from the iOn content repository to site visitors using any browser on any platform (Browser support is determined by the compatibility provided in design templates that are used to display information. Any number of templates can be created to support any client device or browser).

Content administrator PC system requirements:

Operating System: Microsoft Windows NT/2000/XP (XP recommended) or Mac OS 10.3
Processor: 200 MHz minimum (700 MHz+ recommended)
RAM: 64MB minimum (256 MB recommended)
Hard Drive: no minimum requirement
Display: 1024 x 768, 16-bit color or higher

Server system requirements:

The system requirements for staging and production servers depend largely on load and reliability requirements. Below is an average modern server configuration followed by several deployment scenarios with load estimates (all using this same configuration of server):

Operating System: iOn.Admin and iOn.Site may run on any operating system, such as Windows 2000, Linux, Solaris, etc. that supports Sun's Java Virtual Machine (JVM) 1.42+
Processor: 2.0 GHz dual-processor
RAM: 2 GB
Hard Drive: 80GB

The following is a minimum server deployment. EM3 iOn Admin, iOn.Site, the database, and the Java servlet container all running on a single server. Many factors influence performance, such as page weight (amount of text and graphics) and number of dynamic content object relationships. However, below is an estimated load (per day) for sites that are of average complexity and weight, assuming 50% or less average processor utilization:

15,000 – 20,000 visitors
200,000 – 300,000 page views
1,000,000 – 1,500,000 hits

While this topology can support most medium-traffic Web sites, it includes little redundancy for hardware failures (i.e., if there is a failure in any component, all Web sites will be unavailable).

To support higher traffic or provide slightly more reliabillity, you may deploy iOn.Admin and iOn.Site on separate servers. The choice in this scenario is where to place the database. Below are the two possible configurations using a two-server environment.

The first topology will support higher traffic because the production Web server and database server are separated and are not both competing for the same processor resources. However, it includes more points of failure (i.e., if any critical hardware component fails on either server, all the Web sites will be unavailable). Average traffic might be this:

25,000 – 30,000 visitors
300,000 – 500,000 page views
1,500,000 – 2,000,000 hits

The second topology provides slightly better reliabillity because any hardware component may fail on the Admin/Staging server, but all sites will remain available. If any hardware component fails on the Production server, both the admin application and the sites will be unavailable. However, this will provide approximately the same average traffic as the single-server scenario described above.

Below is a topology that offers slightly more reliability because the database, iOn.Admin, and iOn.Site are installed on separate servers. The average daily load will be similar to that dedicated production server scenario described above.

For higher-traffic sites, iOn can be deployed across a Web server farm. For ultimate performance and reliability, each production Web server can be fed by a dedicated database machine or a cluster. This scenario will scale linearly with each set of Web/Database servers added (up to network bandwidth limitations).

All of these scenarios assume 100% dynamic generation of requested pages.