Alfresco Community/Enterprise - 2 Tier Architecture

[dave984]

Hi all, i've read a lot about the differences between Alfresco Community and Enterprise(clustering, loadbalancing, connector and so on).
I really don't understand if i could apply a 2 tier architecture for Community Edition, i mean separate the content platform tier, where the Alfresco products are deployed, from the storage tier where content(data+metadata) gets actually stored.
Is it possible with Community or i need Enterprise?
Just in case, would it be possible with the Departmental Edition?

Thanks in advance

[mrogers]

Out of the box both community and enterprise support separate display tier (alfresco share) and content tier (the alfresco repository).   and a separate solr search server.   We could also make the picture more complicated by talking about the different tiers within the alfresco repository, but for the purposes of this answer lets not go there.

Alfresco clustering is an enterprise specific feature where you have more than one machine running the alfresco repository.  So you can support higher loads or have some level of redundancy for disaster avoidance.

[dave984]

Thank you Roger, how can i understand if my network connectivity is good enough for the heavy demands on the database?
I know it's not a simple question!

[mrogers]

If you run the db locally to the alfresco repository then there's no network to worry about.   For a simple set up that's the best way to do it.    With a separate database tier it's important to connect to it via a fast network with low latency.   There are advantages in running the db separately,  but a poor network will hurt more.

As to what hardware and architecture to use you need to do some benchmarking and requirements gathering.   But a single alfresco server should be a good start.

[dave984]

In my situation i have more than 10 millions documents and about 1 TB of data. For this scenario i know the best solution will be the Enterprise Edition. But my company is not so happy to change the actual DMS and invest in one shoot to another. So i want to prove them with a Community Edition we can have the same results and outcomes. For this reason i think best architecture will be the 2 Tier Architecture described above…

[mrogers]

O.K.  Good luck and give it a try.

[mcprhce]

Hello,

I am new to Alfresco and we need to configure Alfresco Community edition to my office. For hardware requirements, are there any pointers that someone can provide me as to how to go about coming up with the required hardware to run Alfresco? I would need to consider #users, #concurrent users, #documents, average size of documents, average growth in terms of documents and users etc.

What I am struggling with currently is how do I know how many concurrent users would one Linux server running Alfresco support? Are there any formulas that I could use? Are there any heuristics to follow? Sorry for all the questions but any help will be greatly appreciated! As you can see, I am more of a developer and less of a sysadmin.