8.4 Deployment Scenarios

8.4.1 Information Management

Consider an example of an organization that has about 100,000 employees in 10 different locations within a city and 10 different cities in a country. This organization wants to deploy iFolder for information management (storing, retrieving, and sharing) across cities. You want to make sure that management overhead for the 100,000 users in this scenario does not become excessive.

In this case, the administrator can use iFolder to specify a group of users and servers for a city. iFolder automatically distributes the group of users to the servers specified for the city. In just 10 operations, 100,000 users can be provisioned and user-balanced according to their the cities. Now, the 100,000 users can create, store, retrieve, and share data among other peers and also create confidential iFolders that are encrypted. The group of users within a city must be specified so that a user is not accidentally provisioned to a server that is in a different city, which might cause more remote traffic and low response time.

8.4.2 Load Balancing

Consider an organization with multiple branches operating in a city that has a network set up in such a way that the response time across any branch is constant. Given this case, iFolder can be deployed with auto-user provisioning without specifying a particular user group. The iFolder server automatically load-balances the users across the servers. Because the response time across any branch is constant, the user can be provisioned to any of the servers in the branch and still get a constant response from the iFolder server.