Skelta BPM and
High Availability
Introduction
Companies are now adopting cloud for hosting their business process management
(BPM) tools. BPM on cloud can help control costs, optimize business processes and
improve organizational agility all while achieving a high level of service availability.
This whitepaper discusses High Availability (HA) in conjunction with BPM and cloud
computing; benefits of highly available BPM solutions; and examines how Skelta BPM
enables high availability.
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Contents
High Availability: An Overview 3
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BPM and High Availability 3
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Benefits of a Highly Available BPM Solution 3
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How to Achieve High Availability 4
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How Skelta BPM Enables High Availability 4
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Software Features That Enable High Availability 5
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BPM and high availability using a virtualized or cloud environment 5
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Why BPM on Cloud? 6
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Conclusion 6
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from Invensys Systems, Inc.
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High Availability - management. BPM systems must evolve along
with the company.
An Overview As the company grows so do its business
processes and data, which ultimately increases
High Availability is a system design approach the demand for:
for analyzing and managing the impact of
planned and unplanned outages. It is one of the
• More computing power (since process
most important issues for organizations today.
automation increases)
High availability solutions provide a robust
• More data storage capacity
backup capability so that applications keep
• Secure backup plan to maintain long-term
running without disruption, even during system
availability of data
outages. An organization that is planning to
• Improved and highly available services
implement a high availability strategy must
perform a thorough analysis of its business
A robust BPM solution, which is agile as well as
processes to clearly identify the processes that
responsive to changing business needs, is very
require high availability. However, there are
much required to deliver reliable and highly
certain prerequisites that must be considered
available services.
before implementing high availability, such as:
Benefits of a Highly Available
• Restructuring the overall IT architecture BPM Solution
so that it can easily adapt to the high
availability model
Following are the reasons why high availability
• Getting rid of legacy systems or outdated
and business process management must go
software and hardware
hand in hand:
• Streamlining all important business
processes
• A highly available BPM solution can help
• Training and skill development
minimize the impact of planned outages
• Investments in more advanced and robust
(when systems or data are temporarily taken
systems
offline to perform necessary maintenance
tasks)
Highly available systems or solutions can
• Unplanned outages can be managed more
reduce service interruptions, freeing IT staff
efficiently with high availability solutions
to focus more on performance or capacity
• In the event of a disaster, all mission-
management of services. They also provide
critical data and applications can easily be
disaster recovery capability while significantly
recovered and resumed to the normal state
reducing downtime
within minutes
• High availability solutions can help with
BPM and High Availability
backup window reduction, which means you
can minimize the time your services remain
unavailable during backups
With increasing process complexity and rising • Load balancing can be achieved more
compliance costs, the need is more than ever efficiently in an IT environment, which is
for implementing a secure, highly scalable based on a high availability approach and
solution. Organizations are looking for ways has a place for an advanced BPM solution
to minimize downtime by deploying systems
or solutions which are specially designed for
failover or redundancy.
Business Process Management (BPM)
applications are at the core of a company,
and are designed to support enterprise-
wide processes, such as finance, project
management and human resource
3
How to Achieve failover capabilities to your IT environment,
allowing you to easily add or remove machines
from the Web Farm or from the cluster.
High Availability
In today’s competitive business environment
an unscheduled downtime can seriously
affect a company’s business as well as its
How Skelta BPM Enables
profitability. Avoiding unplanned outages or IT
High Availability
systems failures is one of the key concerns for
companies across the globe. Therefore, systems Skelta BPM offers a range of deployment
and applications must be designed, deployed scenarios that are in line with the deployment
and maintained in a way that ensures their high methodologies discussed above. Shown below
availability while reducing the risks associated are the two deployment scenarios, which can
with unstable platforms. help organizations achieve a highly available
Skelta BPM solution.
Below are two important scenarios; they
differ dependent on the unique needs related Scenario 1: Addressing High
to system load and usage patterns. Availability of Web Servers
In this scenario, the Web Server and
1. High Availability and Load of Skelta Services are installed on the same
machine, while Databases are installed on a
Web Servers separate machine. By hosting this set up on
multiple computers, a Web Farm with clustered
This scenario requires the Web Farm to be
Skelta Services can easily be created.
installed on multiple web servers. Databases
and services should be installed on different
machines. This is more appropriate for
Web Farm
situations which demand quick response from
Machine 2 Server 2 Server N
web servers under heavy load situations. Components Installed: Components Installed: Components Installed:
*Skelta Services (including Skelta Skelta Services (including Skelta Skelta Services (including Skelta
Advanced Server Service) Advanced Server Service) Advanced Server Service)
Skelta Enterprise Console Skelta Central Configuration Site Skelta Enterprise Console
2. High Availability and Load on Skelta Central Configuration Site Skelta Enterprise Console Skelta Central Configuration Site
Services or High Availability and
Load on Services and Web Servers
or High Availability of Services and
High Load on Web Servers Client Installation
Skelta Database
Web Server Machine 1
Components Installed:
Skelta Server
There are two ways of achieving this: Skelta Database
Skelta Farm database
Skelta Repository database
Share Point Client
• Place application services and databases
on different machines. Make sure that the
services reside as a cluster on a Web Farm.
• Maintain a Web Farm with Web Servers and Scenario 2: Addressing High
application services cluster on separate Availability on Services
machines. The application databases should
be installed on a different machine. In this scenario, Skelta Services and Skelta
Databases are installed on different machines,
These two deployment techniques ensure and the Web Farm is installed on multiple web
high availability and scalability by enabling servers. Web Servers in the Web Farm will have
the load to be equally distributed among all Skelta Central
the machines in the cluster and the Web Farm.
Failure of one server does not impact other Configuration Site and Skelta Enterprise
servers. In case a server goes offline, the service Console installed. All the processing requests
is maintained by other servers. This provides received by a Web Farm are directed to
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different hosts in the Web Farm, which results Scalability
in low response time and high application
throughput. Depending on the number of workflow
execution requests, the number of servers
Web Farm
running the Skelta Workflow Engine in a cluster
Machine 3 Server 2 Server N
can be increased or decreased. Once the
Components Installed: Components Installed: Components Installed:
configuration is done and the Skelta Workflow
Skelta Central Configuration Site Skelta Central Configuration Site Skelta Central Configuration Site
Skelta Enterprise Console Skelta Enterprise Console Skelta Enterprise Console Engine is started, it automatically joins the
cluster and starts sharing the load immediately.
Failover: This feature of Skelta BPM supports
Skelta Server
Machine 2 safe shutdown or restart of any server running
Components Installed:
Skelta Services the Skelta Workflow Engine in the cluster,
Client Installation
without affecting the execution of workflows
Skelta Database
Web Server Machine 2 running on that server. In cases of shutdown
Skelta Server
Components Installed:
Skelta Farm database or restart, the other Skelta Workflow Engine
Skelta Repository database
Skelta Database
services in the cluster resume all pending tasks
Share Point Client
of the server that was shutdown.
In addition to the deployment scenarios
Software Features That described above, below are few capabilities
that you must consider while planning for a
Enable High Availability High Availability Solution:
• Backup plan for server data supporting
critical services to ensure recovery from
The Skelta BPM software is specifically designed hardware failure and disaster
to support failover and clustering capabilities. It • Centralized monitoring of essential
comes equipped with the following features: processes for availability and performance
across platforms and physical and virtual
• Active-Active load balancing environments
• Scalability • More efficient server, networking, and
• Failover capabilities storage to provide maximum availability and
cost-effectiveness
Active-Active Load Balancing • Consistency and ease deployment of
well-defined configurations
A true Active-Active load balancing can
• Real-time visibility into hardware and
be achieved only when the load is shared
software assets across the enterprise
uniformly by all the servers in the cluster. The
Skelta Workflow Engine and the Skelta Task
BPM and high availability
Scheduler services on different servers form a
cluster to share the load. The workflow client
always requests the least used server in the
cluster for workflow execution. The Skelta using a virtualized or cloud
Workflow Engine, during the execution of a
workflow, identifies the least used server and
environment
then forwards the workflow execution to this
server–thereby enabling workload distribution Virtualization and cloud computing can enable
across the servers. organizations to rapidly create and deploy
applications while saving infrastructure,
application, support and deployment costs.
For these reasons, it is not surprising that BPM
systems are increasingly being virtualized and
hosted in cloud environments, rather than
being deployed on physical hardware. In fact
many BPM solution providers are already into
the Cloud, offering BPM software as a service.
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Why BPM on Cloud? Conclusion
Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) is An organization that is planning to implement
basically cloud-based business process a high availability strategy must perform a
management that delivers business processes thorough analysis of its business processes
through BPM tools or applications hosted on to clearly identify the processes that require
the cloud, in a pay-per-use pricing model. high availability. BPM solutions that provide
for high availability ensure mission critical
The benefits of using BPM services on cloud processes are always running. Unplanned
are just like any other cloud service. BPaaS outages can therefore be managed efficiently.
eliminates the need for upfront capital BPM suites, such as Skelta BPM, ensure that the
investments while reducing operational backup window is significantly reduced and
expenditure. It reduces the efforts required to enterprises focus on core business needs rather
upgrade operations and systems, and improves than challenges in the availability of its critical
organization’s capability to scale up its services. processes.
Some of the key benefits of hosting BPM
services or solutions on cloud are as follows:
• Cloud provides a secure, scalable and
robust platform which ensures high
availability of services
• Using BPM on cloud means no upfront
capital investment in machinery and
software
• Software upgrade requirements are taken
care of by the cloud service provider, which
saves time and money both
• It reduces operational expenditure and
increases business agility and consistency of
application services
• Cloud-based BPM services reduce
dependency on IT and enable IT resources
to focus on key business needs
• Resources are available on demand, which
means you can scale up your business as
and when required
• Increased availability and data security to
ensure fast recovery of data
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About Invensys Skelta BPM
Invensys Skelta is the recognized industry leader in .NET based BPM technology through its product – Skelta
BPM which offers 100% embeddable, Enterprise class, BPM solutions to help organizations achieve
operational agility.
Skelta BPM enables easy to deploy, web based process workflows across the business latitude and puts the
control directly in the hands of the users.
Skelta BPM, through its web based graphical user interface enables business users, analysts,
managers and other stakeholders to collaborate with developers in:
99 Process Definition and Design
99 Process Execution
99 Process Monitoring and Optimization
Our BPM approach empowers organizations to achieve Operational resilience through process agility.
We have consistently helped our customers achieve their BPM objectives and enhance
operational efficiency through:
99 Our strong product line
99 Mature solutions framework (Accounts Payable, Leave Management,
Document Management System and solutions for any business area)
99 Evolved Professional Services for a seamless post sale experience
Evaluate Skelta BPM Request Demo
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© Copyright 2013 Invensys Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.
All other names and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective
companies or owners.
