Going Viral with Scalability
About 18 months ago, I joined Facebook. I befriended a handful of colleagues and then began using the Find Friends feature to see which adventurous souls from my high school had made the jump. To my surprise, there were only two. Over the months, friends would trickle in and I’d get an occasional friend request, then two, then three. The trickle quickly became a stream and now it’s a flood. Each friend has their own space, some info, and the inevitable portfolio of 20 year old photos that have been scanned in at 300dpi, 24-bit color, and uploaded to yield petabyte after petabyte of data.
The viral phenomenon of Facebook, and its ability to stay responsive, is a classic case study in scalability and architecture. To build such a system, you need to start with components that have the ability to scale and expand in capacity as the needs of the end users increase. One web server must become two, two database servers must replicate and become four, and disk after disk must accommodate the growing amount of information.
Social Networking aside, this same logic is critical in your organization. Your IT group has been given the task of deploying a new Managed File Transfer solution. Initially it will service one or two departments as a pilot. Over the coming months, just as more friends joined Facebook, so too will more departments be brought online with your new offering. Finally, you will reach a point where your entire organization is managing files and collaborating with a scalable, secure, and manageable solution.
To be successful, choose a Managed File Transfer vendor that not only provides an entry level solution capable of handling your pilot without breaking the bank, but also has the ability to scale exponentially with your organization. One server must seamlessly become two, then four, databases must replicate, and data storage must expand. With 64-bit architecture being standard issue today, this all must be done in a true 64-bit multithreaded environment because you may not need to handle a million users today, but it sure is nice to know that you could.
Yep, I Facebook, do you?
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