Incorta Solution Topology

DustinB · ‎03-07-2022

Introduction

Incorta is a full stack data analytics platform that is flexible and scalable enough to offer multiple ways to configure and deploy. That flexibility allows Incorta to be tailored to each customer’s specific needs. The goal of this article is to discuss options in deploying Incorta and offer guidance on how to choose the best topology for your requirements.

What you should know before reading this article

We recommend that you be familiar with these Incorta concepts before exploring this topic further.

Applies to

This article applies to any version of Incorta and includes both on-premise and cloud deployments.

Let’s Go

Incorta Topology Overview

Incorta topology can be described as having two primary facets: the physical infrastructure (how the various Incorta components are deployed on how many servers) and the application configuration (single or multi-tenant). Below we will look at both of these topics in more detail.

The Incorta Cluster

An Incorta cluster describes the full installation of the Incorta stack of services and components. A simple Incorta cluster can be installed on a single server (also known as a vertical cluster) and many customers find this sufficient for their requirements. As detailed in the Hardware Sizing Guide, the Incorta cluster can be deployed across multiple servers (also known as a horizontal cluster) to accommodate horizontal scaling, redundancy/high availability, and/or performance improvements.

Tenants

An Incorta tenant is an “application” defined in an Incorta cluster. A tenant comprises a full Incorta application solution. It includes the entirety of the application content (dashboards, schemas, data sources), application security (users, groups, object permissions), and application schedules (dashboards, alerts, data loads). The Incorta administrator can use the Incorta Cluster Management Console (CMC) to export an existing tenant into a single zip file. This zip file contains the entire application definition and it can be imported into a separate, clean Incorta cluster. After loading data, the application will exist as a fully complete copy of the original Incorta application.

An Incorta cluster can contain one or more tenants. For clusters with multiple tenants, it is important to note that each tenant exists entirely independently of the other tenants: there is no sharing of any data or users between tenants. Most customers find their requirements satisfied with a single tenant for all of their use cases.

Incorta Topology Guidance

As mentioned above, most customers find their production Incorta solutions deployed on a single Incorta cluster and a single tenant for all their various use cases and users/groups. This topology offers the least amount of administrative overhead for setup and maintenance. Even with high content and data security restrictions, Incorta’s feature flexibility allows a single tenant to meet these requirements. Now let us review some examples of when an additional cluster or tenant makes sense.

Incorta Clusters

Each additional Production Incorta cluster whether vertical or horizontal comes at an additional administrative cost due to increased management of physical servers and software on each server. With that in mind, use separate Incorta clusters if:

You have a contractual obligation or government regulation mandate to keep data and tenants physically separated.
You have large data volumes but limits on server sizing that require separating use cases across multiple clusters.
You have extremely large data volumes but elect to distribute use cases across multiple clusters to allow using cheaper commodity servers.
You have clusters dedicated to particular organizations that have their own IT admin and hardware allocations

Production Tenants

Each additional Production tenant comes at additional administrative cost. Because tenants are completely siloed from one another, each tenant will have its own data sources, user security and management, and content. As use cases, users, and complexity grow that also will increase administrative overhead. With that in mind, use separate tenants if:

You have user groups that have different login requirements
You need tenants dedicated to different use cases because they are managed by different organizations within the company and the data/use cases do not overlap.

Summary

There are many configurations possible for an Incorta solution but typically most customers will be well served by the lowest cost approach of a single Production cluster housing a single tenant. While we have listed a few examples of cases where more clusters and tenants is warranted, there are likely many more that are unique to a given customer. As always when in doubt as to best practices, please reach out to the Incorta Community or Incorta Customer Success team for guidance.