Managing Systems and Workgroups: A Guide for HP-UX System Administrators

Planning a Workgroup
Distributing Applications and Data
Chapter 264
For the greatest ease of management (backups and software
maintenance) you should:
• keep data in one central place where it can be easily backed up
• maintain only one version and one copy of each application
• if possible, concentrate applications on a single, powerful server
Aim for the simplest configuration that is consistent with acceptable
performance.
Servers for Specific Purposes
The useful part of any computer system consists of applications and the
data they manipulate. Your task is to decide how to deploy the
workgroup’s applications and data so that they are adequately
accessible, responsive, and secure.
This section assumes that:
• you are going to put workstations (as opposed to display terminals
only) on at least some users’ desks
• the workgroup users will share at least some of the same
applications.
You should plan to keep shared applications in a central location where
you install, configure, back up and maintain them. Similarly, you should
plan to keep all data that users share, and as much volatile data as
possible (that is, data that changes frequently, whether or not it is shared
by more than one user) in a central location where you can back it up
easily, and from where it is distributed to the workstations via NFS.A
system whose disks hold shared data is normally called a file server
(even if the data actually resides in databases rather than ordinary files).
A system on which shared applications are stored might be called an
application server or a compute server; we’ll use application server.
In many workgroups, the file server and the application server are the
same machine, which is simply a warehouse for everything that is shared
and everything that needs to be backed up regularly. This may be
convenient, and it may be the best you can do with the available
hardware, but it is not ideal because the functions of a file server are
different from those of an application server and may interfere with
them: for example a CPU that is busy handling NFS requests will have
fewer cycles for running applications.