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View System Documentation - Hardware and Software Requirements - May 2005

This page describes the hardware and software requirements for both the end user's client computing environment as well as those for the backend server. The first section lists the high level requirements needed for both the client and the backend IBIS-PH View Application Server. Following that list, more detailed information is provided about each critical component. These requirements are left to be somewhat general as one server configuration does not fit all the various adopting agencies needs and are dependent on a variety of factors. The beauty of Java is that it is scalable and runs on virtually all modern operating systems and hardware platforms. Given the above information the requirements really are simply as listed below.

High Level Requirements


Front End Client Internet Browser Requirements


Current Utah System

As of May 2005 Utah is running the Admin, View, and IBIS-Q applications on two different servers. The first hosts the Admin, View systems as well as the MySQL RDBMS with the other server hosting the IBIS-Q system (along with the SAS software and SAS datasets). In the past it has been on as many as four servers View and Admin on a Sun iPlanet box, Oracle on an IBM mainframe, and IBIS-Q/SAS on an HP-UX box. The View, Admin, and MySQL RDBMS portion of the system uses:
The server runs at about 10% utilization with an occasional peak of around 85%. It was purchased in 2004 for under $5,000.

NOTE: The entire IBIS system (View, Admin, relational database, IBIS-Q, and SAS) is capable of being hosted on a single machine but is equally well suited for being hosted on many machines in a distributed environment. The single, minimalist server described above should provide acceptable performance for light to moderate loads. If using with the query system with everything on one box then more CPU and faster disk IO is highly recommend to handle the demands of SAS. If the system is distributed among several machines then a high speed LAN/WAN is also an important factor in overall system performance. Basically, better performance will be achieved with a faster and more powerful machine(s). However, the end user's experience is probably going to be determined more by the speed of the network connection between them and the server since most backend servers easily handle the minimal IBIS application load.


Data Storage

Data Storage Capacity for the IBIS-PH View System is not very large in light of today's high capacity disks. Utah's IBIS-PH View system currently uses approximately 5 gigabytes of storage space for the View System. Most of this space is used for a cache which stores some of the dynamically generated HTML content to the disk for increased performance.

Web Server

Web Server (if using as a front end to the Java app server e.g. IIS or Apache instead of the Java app server's built in web server). This is not required but can be used as a front end proxy to centralize web trending and to aid in network security. If this is desired then that servers hardware/software requirements would need to be considered (typically this is minimal). The web server must be able to handle/be configured/setup for proxy or forwarding/handling the requests/responses to/from from the Java application server which contains the IBIS-PH View system. Microsoft IIS and the Apache web server are two of the more common web servers that are capable of interfacing with a backend Java application server.

Internet infrastructure/connection

Internet infrastructure/connection for the server(s) that are hosting the IBIS system and any related web servers (any needed networking and proxy configurations as well as firewall configurations as required by IT infrastructure).

Java Web Application Server