Clustered server deployments

Large companies often opt for clustered server deployments, where several Spotfire Servers share a database and work together to carry out the server tasks.

Clustered servers provide the following benefits:
  • Failover protection if a server goes down.
  • Scalability for the growing organization.
  • Better performance in a system that handles a high volume of work.

Clustering is not enabled by default in Spotfire Server.

Usually a load balancer is added to the deployment to help distribute the workload, but this is not required. A cluster may also contain multiple Spotfire Servers that can be accessed individually through their URLs, but share the same set of node managers. Companies must supply their own load balancer.

There are many configuration options for clustered server deployments; a typical installation features a single load balancer between the Spotfire Servers and the users (on Spotfire Analyst or web client) to optimize the distribution of requests from the clients to the servers.

You can implement clustering using one of the following data grid products:
  • Hazelcast (the default) is easy to set up but uses non-secure connections.
  • ActiveSpaces requires more configuration but provides secure connections.
  • Apache Ignite is easy to set up and provides secure connections.
    Note: Apache Ignite is currently only recommended for testing purposes, not for a production environment.

It is generally recommended that you have a working basic installation of a single Spotfire Server before setting up the rest of the cluster; to begin installation, see Basic installation process for Spotfire.