Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Digital Signage Scalability - Transaction Argument

Webpavement continues to receive questions on scalability. Here is further justification indicating Webpavement's solutions for digital signage networks are scalable.

Think of scalability and system architecture as follows. Our system architecture uses a 3 tier approach. It has the webserver, application server (middleware) and the database back end. For large networks, we recommend physically installing the system on 2 powerful data-center grade servers. Fortune 100 businesses use this same architecture for critical systems such as Siebel CRM and Peoplesoft supporting millions of transactions every day.

Apply this to a retail digital signage application. If there are 1000 displays in the field, this would translate into 2000 transactions an hour. Each hour, a media player will make 1 transaction call for the xml playlist and another for the filelist that should be downloaded. This is not a lot of transactions. If you don't require the ability to change playlists every hour and prefer a daily update, then this is 2000 transactions 1 time every evening. The only constraint to scalability is content. It is essential to have enough bandwidth in the data center where Sign Server resides and to create network friendly content that matches the bandwidth available at the retail locations.

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