Planning
Mountain climbing can be an amazing adventure, but before you set off you need to do some research, and there are numerous resources you can reference. You can find details on weather in the area, view maps on what the terrain is like, find information on the best equipment to use, find answers to most questions you can think to ask. You can search data online, seek experts to talk with, buy a book, and more to help you with the details you seek.
In our companies, rolling out a new product or feature has us doing research in much the same way. One of the key elements we need to consider is deployment: what hardware pieces do I need and what capabilities do they need? What will the user experience be? How can I improve it, if it’s not what we need? How have others done it? Where do I get the information, I need to understand all of this?
Clearly if things aren’t running smoothly people are going to be unhappy, so you want to make sure you get it right in the first place. It can be a big mountain to scale without help.
Help is here
RSA Archer is excited to share we’ve heard your requests and we’ve been busy making updates to our performance documentation. We want to share what’s new and some background information on how our performance documentation works, so you can better understand how to apply it to your deployment.
People often ask where the new performance numbers are for a release? The Sizing Section of the Planning Guide has been designed to aid you, with the factors you should consider, when deploying RSA Archer, and specific features. For each release, we run performance tests to ensure those benchmarks are still accurate. The basic information, outlined for each of the environment sizes in Chapter 2, is what should guide you to where you want to start. With RSA Archer performance, things like CPU, memory, the hardware in usage, configuration of features, layout of applications, etc. play into the numbers varying between environments. The RSA Archer application is flexible, and every customer configuration is different. Customers, therefore, need to stage the software in an environment that mimics their HW deployment, AND contains RSA Archer configured for the usage of their users. Our baselines are specific to our environments, and what we use release over release, to ensure we don’t need to investigate changes prior to shipment. The numbers we get will not reflect specifically what customer A gets vs. customer B. If there’s a change in our numbers, then internally, we work to fix that issue prior to shipment.
What’s New?
Beginning with 6.7 we added a section related to Advanced Workflow, which provides additional insight into how usage of that feature could change the requirements outlined in the basic environment section. With the recently published update for 6.8, we added more feature specific information for ITSVP, and Elasticsearch. And we’re not done there! We will continue to assess some of the other existing features to expand the Guide, and we are working with our internal teams to ensure new features have performance documentation.
We have updated our ACME Corporation Case Study document. It is designed to provide you a summary of expected system performance in a typical deployment. As part of the refresh, we added some sections related to Advanced Workflow and caching.
We’d be remiss talking about performance, if we did not remind you, that the Platform Guide has a section on maintenance. It contains our recommendations for ongoing maintenance activities all customers should perform.
We hope the information we’ve shared makes scaling the mountain easier. You can always share additional ideas with us at RSA Ideas.
To learn more about what’s new in our 6.8 release, please follow our blog series and join us on the Virtual Roadmap sessions or a Free Friday Tech Huddle.
