This section provides background information and guidance on the software and hardware environment required for supporting installations of PhixFlow.
The diagram above illustrates a typical process of gathering requirements, and drawing from this:
- the choice of platform software (operating system, database)
- network topology
- server sizing.
One important aspect of assessing your requirements is to avoid over specifying the resources needed to run PhixFlow, as much as to ensure that sufficient resources are provided. In most virtualised environments, which the vast majority of PhixFlow installations will run in, altering CPU and memory are straightforward. We have provided guide sizings below, but it is possible to set resources at a starting level, and increase and decrease in response to the observed perforamnce of the system. In this way, you can control costs in balance with meeting the needs of your solution. Establshing the requirements clearly at this stage helps to find this balance and measure the system against these requirements as the solution is established.
The table below illustrates where there are strong links between requirements and platform planning outcomes, but it is useful to consider
| Requirement | Description | Strongly linked to |
|---|---|---|
| Security considerations | Does the solution handle sensitive data?
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| Recovery (RPO, RTO) | Resilience to system and data loss - Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) |
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| Phyiscal location of users | Is there a large user base, and this is geographically scattered? If so, over what regions? Are a lot of the users home works, with variable and unpredictable home internet connections? |
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| Performance requirements |
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| Current infrastructure | Fit it with current standards and skills |
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| Coroporate software licensing | Cost considerations - can we use existing licences for operating system and database? |
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The following links cover each of the above planning outcomes.
This is part of a process to go from planning to a full installed PhixFlow, which generally follows the following path
| Stage of process | Reference | ||
|---|---|---|---|
System planning | System planning results, indicative server sizings, proposed network topology, security frameworks, location for solution. Often this is enough to support the sales/ proposal stage of the process, although in some cases the process will require further detail, in particular elemetnts of the detailed infrastructure planning | Sales/ proposal | This page |
| Infrastructure planning | Engagements between your technical team and PhixFlow's | ||
| PhixFlow installation | |||
| Proof of concept | In many cases, a proof of concept installation of PhixFlow is created early on in discussions, with only minimal consideration of long term planning concerns, and this runs through to the point at which PhixFlow is made avaiable on the fully planned platform. The proof of concept build can be on any platform set up that meets the minimum system requirements, but we have also provided an example installation that you can run through, based on the Ubuntu distribution on linux, and the MariaDB database, from initial server creation to a fully operational PhixFlow. | ||
| Minimum system requirements | This only represents a common set of steps for getting from proposal to deployment. As long as the minimum system requirements are met, you can take any approach and platform configuration you wish. |
- System planning - establish planning outcomes, indicative server sizings, proposed network topology, security frameworks, location for solution
- Detailed infrastructure planning - servers configuration, including disk partitioning, network and network components, operating system
- PhixFlow installation - PhixFlow platform components (database, Java, Tomcat) and PhixFlow itself
This is by no means . In many virtualised platforms, databases will the either hosted as cloud native (or "serverless"), or will be created using pre-created image which includes partitioning of the server disks as well as the database installation itself.
System planning