Enterprise BPM Scalability

Ultimus
Enterprise BPM Scalability March 4, 2005

Confidential 15200 Weston Parkway, Suite 106 Cary, NC 27513 Phone: (919) 678-0900 Fax: (919) 678-0901 E-Mail: info@ultimus.comWWW: http://www.ultimus.com All the contents of this White Paper are protected by Copyright Laws and International Trade Agreements. Copyright © 2005 Ultimus, Inc. All rights reserved. The Information contained in this document is accurate as of March 2005. Because of the speed at which technology is advancing, the information recorded herein is dated and may have changed since this document was authored.Introduction As enterprise-wide cross-departmental BPM deployments become increasingly common, so does the need for a robust scalable BPM solution that can scale to meet the most rigorous of your process needs. This paper describes how the Ultimus BPM Suite can scale to meet your most demanding, mission-critical, cross-departmental business processes.
Ultimus - Built from the Ground Up for Scalability Ultimus has been built from the ground-up with scalability in mind. The Ultimus BPM Suite uses a scalable, open, and reliable architecture necessary for business process management deployments that could potentially involve thousands of users. The architecture is based upon a Microsoft .NET foundation and leverages industry-standard and powerful enterprise computing technologies, including Web Services and XML. At the center of the product architecture is the Ultimus BPM Server, which is a powerful process execution engine that monitors and controls business processes. The BPM Server responsible for the orchestration of events within and across multiple business processes, and also manages integration with existing enterprise systems for manipulation of process-related data. Human interaction with the BPM Server is supported through a robust client interface, which is leveraged by the Ultimus Client modules, and back-end integration is supported through open technologies such as .NET, Web Services and the Ultimus Flobots. From a foundational perspective, the Ultimus BPM Server is built on a highly scalable multi-thread component-based architecture. Ultimus leverages a unique stateless execution model that stores session, state and log information in centralized database structures. This reliable persistence model ensures that task information is kept in memory for as little time as possible, minimizing the risk of information being lost due to issues such as operating system failures. Even in the event of a system failure, Ultimus' transaction processing model ensures that task information is properly committed to the database, or rolled back to the prior state. This powerful, stateless architectural foundation has the following key benefits: rdo Ultimus is able to seamlessly leverage 3 party network/IP load balancing solutions for near-limitless linear scalability. As an example, products such as Windows Server provide native network load balancing features that Ultimus leverages out-of-the-box. Since Ultimus is stateless and does not support the concept of "sticky sessions" (that are tied to particular components on a server), any load balancing product can pass requests to multiple BPM Servers that are set up in parallel, redundant configurations. Ultimus is also not dependant on the particular load-balancing algorithm used by the load balancing product. In addition, Ultimus servers can easily be added to parallel load balanced configurations - all that you need to rdensure is that the new Ultimus server is identified to the 3 party load
©2004 Ultimus, Inc. Ultimus and Scalability Ultimus Confidential
balancing product. The diagram below illustrates Ultimus in a network load-balanced deployment scenario:
In the configuration above, multiple Ultimus BPM Servers are set up in rdparallel on Web Server (IIS) machines. The 3 party load balancing product is responsible for dynamically distributing load across the Web Servers, and ultimately to the Ultimus BPM Servers behind them. o Ultimus' unique architecture also allows it to leverage out-of-the-box capabilities provided in Windows Server 2000 and 2003 for high availability and fail-over redundancy. These high availability and fail-over clustering capabilities are provided as native features in the Advanced and Datacenter Editions of ... [download for more]