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Chapter 1 Overview of Netscape Application Server Deployment

This chapter introduces you to deploying Netscape Application Server (NAS), an application server that enables enterprises to easily develop, implement, and manage business-critical Internet applications. As a NAS customer, you are assured of a solid development, deployment, and administrative platform with comprehensive legacy and enterprise integration solutions.

This chapter describes briefly what you need to know to set up your NAS system in the best way possible—that is, the way that best meets your application, transaction, and security needs.

This chapter contains the following sections:


What Is Deployment?
In this book, deployment refers to the process of setting up Netscape Application Server (NAS) at your site. When installing and migrating NAS to your production environment, there are several issues to consider and steps to follow for the deployment process to fully take advantage of your particular corporation's environment and needs. This book is organized according to these recommended steps.

To further clarify, in this book deployment does not refer to deployment of applications. Application deployment is one of many issues involved in deploying NAS, but it is not by any means the only or most important issue. For details about deploying applications, see Chapter 2, "Deploying and Upgrading Applications," in the Administration Guide.

Think of a successful deployment in terms of the following general goals:

Knowing your system's capabilities. A major goal of the deployment process is to develop a set of expectations for your NAS system and understand the system's capabilities and limits. To better understand your server's capacity, you need to determine such factors as number of users, typical peak capacity, typical session duration, types of requests being processed, and so on. You gather this information and then analyze it to establish a processing threshold for your site.

Maximizing performance. Once you understand Netscape Application Server's capabilities, you can focus on maximizing performance within your system's processing scope. Your number one goal in deploying NAS is to make sure that its performance is optimal for your environment. Performance consists of two measurable factors: primarily throughput, and, in some instances response time.

Throughput refers to capacity, or the number of requests that NAS can service in a given time period. A request consists of a single user's attempt to access data, and the return of that data by the server. Throughput is measured in requests per minute or requests per second.

Response time is the time it takes for a request to be processed. You begin measuring response time from the moment a user submits a request until the moment the server returns the result of the request back to the user. The unit of measurement for response time is seconds.

Improving scalability. Scalability refers to the ability to support an increase in users and requests, also referred to as an increase in load, by proportionally increasing hardware resources, without degrading response time or system stability. In other words, scalability is the system's ability to cope with an increase in users and requests when that increase is matched with a proportional increase in hardware resources. If response time degrades, despite the addition of hardware resources in proportion to the increase in users, then the system is not scalable.

To meet increased load, you can scale up the number of CPUs, the number of machines, or both. Throughput improves as you scale up your hardware resources.

Ensuring fault tolerance. An important goal of deployment is to eliminate any single point of failure in your NAS system. If one or more servers fail, fault tolerance and fail-over capabilities ensure that transaction requests continue to be processed without interruption. The server fail-over capabilities and state and session management features of NAS can be configured to meet your ongoing processing needs.

Deployment Terminology This guide uses a number of terms that relate to the process of deploying Netscape Application Server (NAS). Since these terms are often used by technology professionals in a variety of ways, they are listed and defined in the Glossary at the end of this book so that you understand their meaning in the context of NAS deployment.


Phases of the Deployment Process
For this book, the deployment process is divided into four phases, each one building on the previous one. By following these phases, you will address the deployment goals discussed earlier.

Planning Your Environment Planning your environment is the first phase of deployment and consists of determining how Netscape Application Server (NAS) will fit into your overall enterprise. You may realize during this process that you must change the structure and components of your network to accommodate your NAS needs. Or, if your network structure is not flexible at this time, use the environment planning process to determine how you can best deploy NAS to fit within the existing network setup.

Determining System Capacity Determining system capacity consists of figuring out what sort of load will be placed on your NAS system and how you can accommodate this load. During this phase, you'll develop a profile of the number of users accessing NAS at your site and the sorts of requests they submit. Then, based on this kind of information, you can decide how to structure and configure NAS so that it successfully handles the capacity requirements you expect to have.

Running Stress and Performance Tests After you configure NAS, deploy a representative sampling of applications and run them over the system to determine Netscape Application Server's tolerance threshold. Wherever you identify bottlenecks, use this phase to fine-tune the system and improve performance.

Deploying the Production System Finally, after you have tested and refined system performance, deploy your live NAS system. You may encounter new bottlenecks once you go into production, but at this point, you'll have experience fine-tuning the system and will know what sorts of mechanisms you can employ to improve performance.

 

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