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Outscaled SmartTarget environment

The following diagram shows a standard deployment model for deploying Fredhopper and SDL Tridion (SmartTarget) in an outscaled scenario, where Fredhopper is running on premise:

Intranet zone

The intranet zone is the zone where content is created, for example templates and schemas by developers and Web content—including content items and Promotions—by authors, editors and marketers. The intranet zone contains the following components installed behind your organizations's firewall:

Content Manager
The Content Manager contains all content. On the Content Manager side you will generally want to outscale the Publisher. The publisher renders and packages content and uses an internal Transport Service to deliver this content to the Content Distributor. Publishing in SDL Tridion is performed by the Publisher service requests of end users or automated processes. Publishing can consume significant server resources such as CPU or memory but has no dependency on IIS or any other Web server, which makes the Publisher a good candidate to run on a dedicated server.
Content Deployer (Content Delivery)
The Content Deployer sends preview content items to Fredhopper. The intranet zone requires a basic Content Delivery installation only and does not need to be scaled out.
Fredhopper Preview server
The Fredhopper Preview server is for developing and testing Promotions. On the Fredhopper Preview server you need to install the following components:
  • Index Server—processes content and builds hierarchical data for previewing Promotions
  • Query Server—evaluates Fredhopper queries on the Staging Web site (Experience Manager)
  • Business Manager—environment for implementers to create triggers and configure the system. You then replicate the business configuration to the Fredhopper Intermediate Server.
Staging Web site
The Staging Web site is a preview version of your Web site for reviewing changes to your Web site including Promotions and content items. You can install Experience Manager here so that Marketers can edit Promotions and content items in the context of your Web site.

Demilitarized zone (DMZ)

The demilitarized zone is where you install your production environment. In the demilitarized zone you need to set up, and if necessary outscale, the following components:

Content Deployer
When you publish content to a live Web site, on the Presentation Server the Transport Package is processed by the Content Deployer and the items in the package are sent on to the Content Broker and to Fredhopper.
It is recommended to add a non-active Content Deployer which takes over if the Content Deployer fails.
Fredhopper Intermediate server
The Intermediate server receives configuration updates from the Preview server and live content items created and published from the Content Manager.
On the Fredhopper Intermediate server you need to install the following components:
  • Index Server 1 and Index Server 2—both servers are active and running (on the same box or on separate machines) and have the same data and configuration which they replicate to the Fredhopper Lives Servers:
    • Index Server 1 replicates config and indexes to Query Servers 1 on Server 1 and Server 2
    • Index Server 2 replicates config and indexes to Query Servers 2 on Server 1 and Server 2
  • Business Manager—for emergency Promotion updates to the live Web site (optional). Note that you need to manually port these changes backwards to keep configuration in sync otherwise subsequent configuration updates from the Preview Server will overwrite these changes (the entire configuration is replicated).
Fredhopper Live server
The Fredhopper Live servers consist of two or more Query Servers each installed on separate machines.
Each Live Server provides active/passive failover support: Query Server 2 provides a fully redundant instance which is only brought online when Query Server 1 fails.
You can outscale Live servers by installing Query Servers on separate boxes and by setting up clusters.
Application Servers
You can outscale the Application Servers that process Web requests and Fredhopper queries to meet whatever requirements you may have.