Tandem Configuration

GaryPrintnw · Post by **GaryPrintnw** » Mon Dec 29, 2014 8:07 pm

As my company continues to grow, and Switch becomes a major part of it, from the preflighting, to the file corrections, to the email notifications, to the file moving, and archiving. We are realizing that if our computer goes down, that our production would drastically slow down.

My questions is what are other companies doing with backing up switch?

Are most companies buying a tandem Licenses and running two Switch programs at the same time? Or are they just putting Switch on a Server and backing up the server once a week.

What are the benefits of both, disadvantages? What would you suggest?

Also i currently have Switch on a Mac mini with 8 GB of Ram and 2.4 GHz Intel processor. Ive noticed in the past month that Switch is starting to get bogged down with the number and size of files going through it.

Would you suggest to get the Tandem license to not put as much work on Switch, or would you move switch to a bigger and faster computer to process everything faster?

How much faster can another computer be over the mac mini?

gabrielp · Post by **gabrielp** » Mon Dec 29, 2014 10:14 pm

I can't really speak to what is the best solution, because I'm sure we do not have the ideal setup, but I can tell you what we are doing. We have a Mac Pro tower (round tube one) with 64GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and the 6 Core CPU. We have an external drive we run Carbon Copy Cloner on. The idea is, if the machine were to go down for any reason, we could get another mac and boot off of the latest CCC backup (right from the external harddrive) and be up within minutes.

I think you have better options on Windows but since we need to be on OSX (due to something with fonts) we can't really take advantage of any virtualization.

I also haven't explored the tandem license.

GaryPrintnw · Post by **GaryPrintnw** » Wed Dec 31, 2014 12:32 am

Thank you for your insight on the situation. Do you feel the Mac handles everything with great speed, are you ever waiting on files to come through?

How does it handle when it overloaded with about 10 100 MB files?

gabrielp · Post by **gabrielp** » Wed Dec 31, 2014 3:13 pm

GaryPrintnw wrote: Thank you for your insight on the situation. Do you feel the Mac handles everything with great speed, are you ever waiting on files to come through?

How does it handle when it overloaded with about 10 100 MB files?

That's a hard question to answer because the flows we use might be very different from yours. I can tell you, that we don't have anything really bogging down the machine now. We send a lot through Switch, lots of files that might be up to 2-3 GB in size and it handles it fine. There's really just a lot of firepower in those new little mac pros.

I can say, adding tons of RAM seems to be a huge help with performance. Also, the SSD seems to make flows run a bit faster.

dkelly · Post by **dkelly** » Wed Dec 31, 2014 4:04 pm

Most of my customers currently run a Tandem setup and our flow design load balances the work between the servers. Previously we would sell a offline/development license but the terms changed with the release of v12. Now with v12 you get an "emergency key" which can be used to get a backup server on-line without having to interact with your reseller or Enfocus should the primary server fail.

The decision between dual systems in Tandem or a single server with manual fail-over using the emergency key depends on your shop's requirements for up-time. At a minimum I would install and configure 2 identical servers with Switch, 3rd party software, flows, databases, mount points, etc even if the fail-over server isn't running constantly. Test your back-up server and make sure you copy over any changes made to the primary server regularly.

Dwight Kelly

Apago, Inc.