Two Portal Servers Two Access Managers

Figure 4–10 shows a configuration for maximum horizontal scalability and higher availability achieved by a horizontal server farm. Two Portals Servers can be fronted with a load balancer for maximum throughput and high availability.

Another load balancer can be put between Portal Servers and Access Managers to achieve authentication and policy processes as a load distributor and failover mechanism for higher availability.

In this scenario, Blade 1500s can be utilized for Portal Services to distribute the load, similar Blades can be used to host Access Manager Services and Directory Services respectively. With the architecture shown in Figure 4–10, a redundancy of services exists for each of the product stack, therefore, most of the unplanned downtime can be minimized or eliminated.

However, the planned downtime is still an issue. If an upgrade or patch includes changes to the Directory Server software schema used by the Access Manager software, all of the software components must be stopped to update the schema information stored in the Directory Server. However, updating schema information can be considered a fairly rare occurrence in most patch upgrades.

Figure 4–10 Two Portal Servers and Two Access Managers