Category: System Requirements

Can I cluster OnSync servers? Can I deploy OnSync on the Adobe Flash Media Server Origin/Edge architecture?

OnSync Enterprise Server Licenses can be deployed on the Adobe Flash Media Server Origin/Edge architecture thereby allowing almost unlimited scalabilty through load balancing, failover and clustering depending on your particular hardware and network restrictions and application requirements.

You can strategically place Edge servers in particular parts of your corporate network to take any bandwidth bottlenecks into account and disseminate bandwidth intensive activity in a controlled manner.

A typical example would be a user emitting a webinar to a large, geographically dispersed audience. The video stream would pass from the user to his closest edge server straight to the origin server. The origin server would then disseminate the single stream to all edge servers which in turn would disseminate the stream to all users connected to the edge servers with each user being served by the edge server closest to them. The edge servers will therefore do the heavy lifting and alleviate the load on the origin server. This means that only a single stream will have to pass from one location to another before being disseminated to all users connected to the particular edge server and thereby allowing bandwidth optimized communications.

Edge servers will always connect to an origin server and any information passed between clients will always pass via the origin server. In some cases this may lead to slightly increased latency in live communications. Every deployment scenario differs in its particular restrictions and bottlenecks. The flexible nature of Origin/Edge architecture allows deployments to be optimized and create high user collaboration environments which otherwise would not be possible.

The following figure shows the typical Edge/Origin architecture which may be used to connect large numbers of clients in different geographic locations:

Source: http://www.adobe.com/de/products/flashmediaserver/pdfs/
fms_wp_ue.pdf

Edge servers can also be chained to provide you with further flexibility in your deployment scenarios.

Typically, only the communications server of OnSync will require clustering which carry the most bandwidth intensive activity. The webserver and (optional) document conversion server would typically not require clustering and be deployed in the same phsyical location as the origin server (although this is not a requirement).

Please note, special licensing conditions apply to Origin/Edge deployments and OnSync clusters, please contact sales for more information. Typically, Digital Samba will handle all installation and configuration of your Origin/Edge servers on your infrastructure together with your engineers.

OnSync takes advantage of the Origin/Edge architecture provided by Adobe Flash Media Server 3 or later. Please refer to Adobe's documentation for more detailed information.

Further reading:
http://www.adobe.com/de/products/flashmediaserver/pdfs/
fms_wp_ue.pdf

ID: #1159
Last update: 2008-08-05 08:36
Author: Digital Samba
Revision: 1.9