This is an advanced topic. It is not necessary to be familiar with this information to operate a system successfully.
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This is an advanced topic. It is not necessary to be familiar with this information to operate a system successfully. |
A typical deployment includes one Vault and several Agents. Each Agent connects to the Vault, which acts as a "traffic cop" and keeps all the Agents in complete sync.
The time it takes to open a file on a given Agent is comparable to opening a file on your LAN, depending on the following factors:
Is the data already fully mirrored (maybe it is a new file, or large changes)? If not, the data needs to transfer and the time will depend on the connection speed between the Vault and the Agent.
What is the latency of the connection between the Vault and the Agent?
Even if a file is fully mirrored locally, the Agent must still report to the Vault that a file is being opened. A very small packet is sent to the Vault. The farther geographically the Agent and the Vault are, the longer it takes for the packet to arrive at the Vault. In some cases, e.g., if the Vault is in India and the Agent in the US, the latency can be 350 ms or more.
The Agent contains many optimizations that dramatically reduce the need for communication between the Agent and the Vault when opening a large number of files in a short amount of time; however, in some situations, an even faster response time is desired. For that, a multiple-Vault configuration may provide the solution. It is a very simple configuration to deploy.
What is involved in multiple-Vault deployment?
Typically, the data that is shared between Agents can be partitioned logically into several volumes. In many cases, most of the access to the data in a given volume is done in one location, while other locations access it less frequently.
Consider the following example:
Volumes 1, 2, and 3 contain information that is frequently accessed and modified in India, and is accessed and modified, but less frequently, in the US.
Volumes A and B contain information that is frequently accessed and modified in the US, and is accessed and modified less frequently in the India.
In this case, you could deploy a Vault in India to act as the "traffic cop" for volumes 1, 2, and 3, and another Vault in the US to act as the "traffic cop" for volumes A and B. After that, an Agent is deployed in the US and another one in India. Both of these two Agents mount all the volumes 1, 2, 3, A, and B. The result is that the LAN in both India and the US would have the five volumes, and they would all be fully accessible to all the authorized users; however, access to volumes 1, 2, and 3 would be faster in India because the Vault is local (no latency), and likewise the access to A and B would be faster in the US.
In fact, the Agent in each country can be colocated with the Vault on the same computer.