Understanding the single-server strategy

The single-server strategy is best suited to smaller Meridian configurations for use in workgroups or small departments. This strategy is based on deploying all Meridian components on a single server, which has the following notable advantages and disadvantages.

Under this strategy, Meridian is installed on a single server that can be upgraded with additional processors and memory to serve the growing needs of more users and documents. An organization may deploy their initial configuration based on this strategy and then transition to a multi-server strategy later.

In particular, a single processor server can be upgraded with an additional processor in those cases where the Meridian application uses a third-party DBMS hosted on the same server. Then, each application can use its own processor assigned by Windows.

More important is the available free memory of the server. Meridian can take advantage of all of the physical memory installed on a server that is accessible by the Windows operating system. Vault documents and metadata are both stored directly on the server in this strategy.

When a Meridian application server has been scaled up under this strategy as much as possible, if the organization’s needs continue to grow, the replacement strategy is to scale the configuration out to multiple servers as described in the following section.