This week I'm attending the ESRI's System Architecture Design Strategies class, taught by Dave Peters. Last summer I posted about working with Dave at one of our client sites, and the class is a real transfer of his knowledge and experience in a very accessible form. If you are in charge of planning your GIS system design, be sure to get to this class.

Some interesting items from todays class:

I had never found the System Integration group's section of the ESRI web site, and they have a whole mess of performance test reports there - all kinds of intersting stuff like ArcGIS Server/ArcIMS performance on 64bit Windows Server, ArcIMS perfomance on Dual Core CPUs and a bunch of papers on high-availability solutions. Very cool if you are thinking about your technology platform.

We also discussed the 9.2 Server licensing situation.

First ArcSDE...
At 9.2 they have put a lot of work into addressing the "chatty" nature of the direct connect, so it's now supposed to be pretty close in performance to running ArcSDE on the server (giomgr.exe processes). So, that's nice. The upside of using direct connect is that you don't have to pay for an ArcSDE license for each socket on your DBMS box. So, this should be a cost savings since there is less load on your DBMS box (no giomgr.exe processes) - which means the same hardware can serve more users. And when you do scale up, there is no licensing hit to ESRI.

The downside is that for direct connect, everything must match in terms of version - so, your 9.2 clients must attach to a 9.2 database. Not bad, but service packs may also be linked - so if you patch the server, you'll need to patch all clients before they can connect again. So - while cheaper out of the gate, the admin complexity may make you think twice.

Which leads to a third option - running the ArcSDE service & giomgr.exe on a totally separate machine. [UPDATE 11/29: Apparently this has been an option for quite some time] Apparently this is a new option with 9.2, and although you have to pay for the sockets, it may be a better mix between SDE on the DBMS, or direct connect.

The ADF...
We also talked about the ADF, and as I noted, the current stance on the ADF is that the server it is deployed on must be licensed for all sockets.

I can't quote anyone on this, but apparently that there is quite a bit of room to negotiate with ESRI in regard to using the ADF to upgrade existing (particularly ArcIMS) applications.

That's it for today - tomorrow we're going to be talking about security & firewalls. This should be very interesting, as it will hilight some of the issues I see with having to have the web controls on the SOM/SOC box (or pay double)