Welcome
- Enterprise RTView Deployment
One of the biggest challenges
of providing data visualization to a variety of consumers is choosing the
ideal deployment technology for your organization. There are many factors
to consider, including optimizing the end user experience, hardware costs,
maintenance costs, performance, scalability and security.
This section is designed
to help you understand the various options, consider the pros and cons
of each, and choose the optimal deployment.
Deployment Options
One major advantage of Enterprise
RTView is that it is a portable delivery platform. This means that all
displays, including graphical elements, data attachments, drill downs,
functions, substitutions and security settings, are portable to any deployment
option - without reengineering. This facilitates implementation and rollout
since development, testing, and production systems can use different deployment
technologies without significant porting costs. If situations change in
your organization and you would like to choose a different deployment option,
you can readily do so.
SL keeps current on the latest
information delivery technologies, such as browser and portal options,
scalable data distribution, application servers and security. This ensures
that the most suitable option for your enterprise remains deployable with
minimal costs. Currently there are five options for Enterprise RTView deployment.
If you have
already chosen your deployment option, you can go directly to the deployment
process from the following links.
Two
Application Deployment Options
Four
Browser Deployment Options
Enterprise RTView is comprised
of data sources, a client and possibly a server. Figure 1 is a high level
illustration of the five deployment scenarios.
Figure 1: Deployment Overview
Application Deployment
In cases where the information
delivered is of a critical, real-time, actionable nature, it may be desirable
to deploy information via an application. For instance, infrastructure
monitoring applications and critical operational dashboards can have a
dedicated platform which only runs this application. End users can focus
on monitoring and responding to the delivered information. In these cases
it may not be desirable to deliver the information in a browser which might
encourage an end user to browse away from critical information.
There are two application
deployment options, Application with Served Data and Application with Direct
Data Connection, as illustrated in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Application Deployment
Overview
Browser Deployment
The most common deployment
option chosen is a browser based deployment. Browsers are chosen for several
reasons: they are a familiar tool for navigating to multiple sources of
information, they are a standard application already resident on most enterprise
platforms, and new information sources can be provided to end users without
the additional IT expense of installing specialized software at each client.
There are three browser deployment
options: Rich Client Browser with Served Data, Rich Client Browser with
Direct Data Connection, and Thin Client Browser.
Rich Client Browser Deployment
The Rich Client Browser
solution has become popular because it has faster processing abilities
for interactions that are critical in some use cases. This is because more
of the processing of interactive displays is done on the client machine
via applet technology.
Most browsers only support
minimal Java technology, making it necessary to install a Java plug-in
on the client machines. In IT situations where the installation of a plug-in
is not a problem, or it is already standard procedure, the Rich Client
Browser deployment may be the best choice. However, in cases where installation
of a Java plug-in is not desirable, the Thin Client Browser deployment
would be the correct choice.
There are two Rich Client
Browser deployment options, Rich Client Browser with Served Data and Rich
Client Browser with Direct Data Connection, as illustrated in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Rich Client Browser
Deployment Overview
Thin Client Browser Deployment
Thin Client Browser deployments
are popular with IT departments that prefer the ease of deployment and
maintenance achieved by this technology. With this option, the client need
only have a standard browser installed to access the Enterprise RTView
dashboards. This deployment requires the installation of the Display Server
which uses AJAX technology to provide interactive dashboards to any standard
browser. Recent advances in this technology have enabled the Display Server
to perform comparably to Rich Client Browser deployments in most use cases.
As illustrated in Figure 4, there are two Thin
Client Browser deployment options: Thin Client Browser with Served Data and Thin
Client Browser with Direct Data Connection.
Figure 4: Thin Client Browser
Deployment Overview
Choosing
The Right Deployment
There are advantages and
disadvantages to each type of Enterprise RTView deployment. Depending on
your environment, there are at most three decisions to make. To make it
easier, we provide a step-by-step guide to help you consider the pros and
cons of each scenario, and readily determine which deployment is the right
one for your organization.
Figure 5 illustrates your
choices, starting with the first decision; whether to have an application
or browser deployment.
Figure 5: Deployment Decision
Process
Let's get started!
|
