Installation guide

SPECTRUM
Installation Guide
Page 14
Document 0675
Disk Striping and RAID
For optimum performance, Aprisma recommends running SPECTRUM on
systems with multiple, ultrawide, 10 K-rpm, SCSI disk drives using disk
striping and/or RAID (redundant array of independent disks) technologies.
Disk striping is a technique for spreading data over multiple disk drives.
RAID is a disk drive system that employs two or more drives in
combination for fault tolerance and performance improvement. For a more
complete discussion of disk striping and RAID, see the white paper,
Techniques for Optimizing SPECTRUM Performance
.
Installing SpectroSERVER on Its Own Workstation
Although the latest processors enable SPECTRUM to manage more devices
and do more work on a single workstation, Aprisma recommends that
SpectroSERVER be installed on a dedicated workstation. To ensure
optimum performance, no other applications should be installed on this
workstation.
If you choose to install SpectroSERVER on a workstation with other
applications (including SpectroGRAPH), memory must be sufficient to
handle the increased load, or the system will be saturated at a lower CPU
utilization than would normally be considered a healthy maximum
(approximately 80 percent). Similarly, high-speed disk input/output is
required to handle these loads.
SpectroSERVER Landscape Handle Requirements
All SpectroSERVER landscape handles must be divisible by 4 and be in the
range of 4 to 16,376. In a distributed SpectroSERVER environment, each
landscape is identified by its landscape handle; therefore, each landscape
must be unique. If you enter the landscape handle in hexadecimal format,
the range is 0x100000 to 0xffe00000, where the lower 20 bits are set to
zero. The encoded landscape handle appears at the top of all views
associated with that landscape.
Aprisma recommends that you use a sequential numbering scheme when
you establish landscape handles. At first it might seem appropriate to
associate a landscape handle with a significant feature of the landscape it
represents, such as a building number, or some portion of an IP subnet
address. However, your entry is encoded into the most significant 14 bits
of the landscape handle, and the result may not appear to relate to the
landscape feature you wanted.