What Windows Administrators need to know about designing a Web site architecture

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What Windows Administrators need to know about
designing aWeb site architecture

• Tony Northrup

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Overview

• Self-Host or Outsource?
• Collocation or Managed?
• Availability Performance Needs
• Software
• Logical vs. Physical Architectures
• Tony Northrup
• Question Answer

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Self-host or Outsource?

• Self-host if
• You have adequate Internet bandwidth
• Your access is reliable enough
• You have Web skills in-house
• Outsource if
• Your bandwidth requirements are high
• You need the redundancy of an ISPs network
• You require expert managed hosting services

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Collocation or Managed?

• Collocate if
• You need an ISPs datacenter and bandwidth
• You know how to manage the hardware and software
  yourself
• Use managed hosting services if you want experts
  responsible for
• Hardware upkeep,
• Software management
• Monitoring
• Backups
• Troubleshooting

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Availability Needs

• What does it cost you if your site is offline?
• Can you afford to be offline for hours if
• A hard drive fails?
• A server fails?
• An Internet access link fails?
• Which costs more, providing redundancy, or
  suffering downtime?
• Address software availability with development
  standards, QA, staging environment, controlled
  publishing

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Performance Needs

• Self-hosted sites bottleneck on bandwidth
• Outsourced sites bottleneck on Web processors
• Make marketing tell you how many users to support
• Use load-testing tools to validate capacity

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Choosing Software

• OS Windows vs. Unix? NT4 or Win2k?
• Web IIS vs. Apache
• DB Oracle vs. MS SQL vs. DB2
• App Nothing vs. MS Commerce Server vs. WebSphere
• Monitoring, reporting

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Three Tier Logical Model

• Presentation provided by IIS
• Application provided by COM
• Database provided by SQL Server

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Single Server Architecture

• One server tasked with Presentation, Application
  and Database
• Low cost
• Limited Performance
• Easy scalability to two server architecture
• Single-server availability

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Two Server Architecture

• One server tasked with Presentation, Application
• Second server tasked with Database tier
• Higher cost
• Better performance
• No easy scalability
• Worse availability than single-server

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Multi-Server Architecture

• Divide each tier across multiple servers
• Scale Presentation, Application using
• Cisco Local Director
• Cisco CSS
• F5 BigIP
• Microsoft AppCenter/NLBS/WLBS
• Scale Database using Microsoft Clusters

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Summary

• Web site architecture varies based on budget,
  performance and availability requirements.
• Priorities must be set on a business level before
  technical people design a solution

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ModeratorQuestion Answer
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AudienceQuestion Answer
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