Planning Your Deployment

C H A P T E R 2

This chapter provides guidelines for planning your installation of Content Delivery Server. The minimum suggested hardware and software requirements for a basic, mid-sized deployment configuration are provided.

The following topics are discussed:

Planning Guidelines

Sample Plan

Hardware and Software Guidelines for a Basic Configuration

Planning Guidelines

When planning your Content Delivery Server deployment, you can start with a small server or cluster and expand to a larger cluster as your service grows. The ability of Content Delivery Server to scale linearly helps to keep initial costs down, while providing simple means for growth.

To support a large subscriber base in a production environment, plan for a cluster of servers running Content Delivery Server. The number and configuration of the servers in the cluster depends on the size of your subscriber base. Also plan for both a dedicated database server and standby database.

When running a cluster, plan for an “N+1 configuration”. This is a cluster that contains one more server running Content Delivery Server than is needed to support your subscriber base. The additional server ensures that your system can handle peak loads in spite of a single server outage.

Sample Plan

Because deployments of Content Delivery Server vary greatly from one customer to another, the TABLE 2-1 provides a sample plan with the minimum requirements for a medium size configuration. See Chapter 4 for a description of a mid-size deployment. You can extrapolate from this information the requirements applicable for the size and number of your deployments.

TABLE 2-1 Server Plan for a Mid-size Configuration
Number of Subscribers	Total TPS	CPUs in Application Server	CPUs in Database Server
250,000	60	2	2
500,000	120	4	2
750,000	180	6	4
1,000,000	240	8	4

The transactions per second (tps) given in TABLE 2-1 are applicable for deployments with up to 96 devices and approximately 6200 pieces of content. The number of supported subscribers listed in the first column of TABLE 2-1 are derived from the tps numbers using the sample calculation methods in Chapter 3. These methods of calculations are based on assumptions that might not apply to your deployment.

An alternative method for calculating the number of supported subscribers consists of estimating concurrency. TABLE 2-2 shows how the number of subscribers per CPU are derived by postulating what percentage of subscribers access the system concurrently and what the average amount of time is between subscriber requests (think time). The current average think time is 6 seconds.

TABLE 2-2 Planning Parameters
Parameter	Value Assuming 0.5% Concurrency	Value Assuming 0.1% Concurrency
Server throughput (TPS per CPU)	30	30
Estimated time between requests (think time)	10 seconds	10 seconds
Active sessions per CPU¹	300	300
Seat capacity per CPU²	60,000	300,000
NOTES: ¹sessions = throughput * think time ²capacity = active sessions / concurrency

Hardware and Software Guidelines for a Basic Configuration

This section provides hardware and software guidelines for a basic configuration. You can use these guidelines in your own planning if your needs are similar to the configuration on which the recommendations are based.

Here are the minimum hardware and software requirements for running a single deployment of the Content Delivery Server:

CPU - Two 1280 + MHz CPUs

Memory - 2 GBytes

Swap Space - At least twice the size of memory, for example, if you have 2 GBytes of RAM, the recommended swap size is 4 gigabytes

Hard Disk - 5 GBytes disk space for system installation, database, and log files (with 36 GBytes of free space)

Java Software Development Kit (JDK) - Version of at least 1.5.0_11 (Java Platform, Standard Edition Development Kit 5.0 Update 11). No license required.

Server - Sun Java System Application Server 9.0, Platform Edition

For more than one Content Delivery Server deployment running on the same host, make the following estimations:

CPU - One 1280 +MHz CPU per deployment

Memory -

1 GByte per deployment

256 KB per service process (Event, PostPaid, Notification, and so on)

0.5 to 1 GByte free memory

For the database, make the following estimations:

CPU - No less than one CPU for every two CPUs in the Content Delivery Server cluster.

Memory - Minimum of 2 GBytes; suggested minimum of 8 GBytes for larger deployments

Disk -

Internal disk for Oracle 10g (with, for example, 36 GBytes of free space)

5 GBytes of internal or external storage for data and 15 GBytes for every 1 million purchases

Oracle Database 10g Release 1 (version of at least 10.1.0.2) , Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition

Note that the character set must be AL32UTF8.

Except for an initial trial configuration, deploy Content Delivery Server and the database on different hardware.