Hi, everyone!
We’re actively working towards the ThingWorx 9.0 release and we’re ready to provide a sneak peek into the biggest feature of 9.0: Active-Active Clustering for High Availability configuration.
You may be wondering: doesn’t ThingWorx already offer High Availability?
Yes, ThingWorx already supports a High Availability configuration. Previous versions of ThingWorx, such as ThingWorx 8.X version releases, support Active-Passive configuration, where one “active” ThingWorx server performs all processing and maintains the live connections to other systems such as databases and connected assets. Meanwhile, in parallel, there is a second “passive” ThingWorx server that is a mirror image and regularly updated with data but does not maintain active connections to any of the other systems. If the “active” ThingWorx server fails, the “passive” ThingWorx server is made the primary server, but this can take a few minutes to establish connections to the other systems.
So, how is ThingWorx Active-Active different?
Active-Active configuration differs from Active-Passive in that all the ThingWorx servers in the cluster are “active.” Not only is data mirrored across all ThingWorx servers, but all of the servers, instead of only one, maintain live connections with the other systems. This way, if any of the ThingWorx servers fail, the other ThingWorx servers take over instantaneously with no recovery time.
Since all ThingWorx servers are active, they are processing in parallel and, as a result, the cluster can process more data than that of a single server or a cluster with an Active-Passive configuration. Simply put, multiple servers working together outperform a single server. This allows customers to scale their deployment by simply adding more ThingWorx servers to the cluster (horizontally scaling), which does not have the same limitations of scale that is achieved by increasing the performance of the server itself.
What does that mean for me?
Higher Availability - You can avoid single points of failure and configure the ThingWorx Foundation platform in an Active-Active cluster mode to achieve the highest availability for your IIoT systems and applications.
Increased Scalability - Now, you can horizontally scale from one to many ThingWorx servers to easily manage large amounts of your IIoT data at scale more smoothly than ever before.
Stay tuned! We’ll be posting more information on Active-Active Clustering—how it's achieved in ThingWorx, architectural component overviews, and what it means for your ThingWorx deployment!
In the meantime, we're running the Active-Active Clustering Beta Program. Interested in participating? Reach out to Ryan Servais (rservais@ptc.com) or Ayush Tiwari (atiwari@ptc.com) to learn more about participation!
Stay connected!
Kaya
