Farewell to 32 Bits
FrameFlow is Making the Move to 64 Bits
Farewell to 32 Bits
FrameFlow is making the move to 64 bits. Read more to find out how it affects your monitoring configuration.
32 Bits vs 64 Bits
As most of you know FrameFlow has always been a 32-bit application. With our lean and mean approach we never needed access to heaps of memory and since our codebase consists of highly tuned C++ code, there was little motivation to make the leap to 64 bits. But now that has changed and we’re excited to share the reasons and results with you.
With some of our customers monitoring well over 10,000 systems from one installation, it’s not unusual to see a FrameFlow configuration that is generating millions of data points and events per day. Until now we’ve used a custom file-based data store that met our requirements for performance. It has worked well but is now showing its age and straining to support larger configurations. Some of you might remember that we made several attempts to use SQL Server as a primary data store. Those attempts failed not because of any problems in SQL Server itself but because relational SQL databases are optimized for environments with many reads from a database that is infrequently updated.
Over the last few years though, several write-optimized database solutions have emerged and we’ve been watching them closely. Most of these are NoSQL databases which means they use key-value pairs to store and retrieve data instead of the columns and rows of a traditional database. We have been evaluating several of them and we are now close to selecting the one that will become the new data store for FrameFlow. The catch is, all the best ones are optimized for 64-bit environments and that’s why FrameFlow is moving to 64 bits too.
Timeframe and Upgrade Notes
Version 2017.1 which is due for release early in the new year will be the first 64-bit version of FrameFlow. What does this mean for your FrameFlow configuration? In order to upgrade to FrameFlow v2017.1, you’ll need to be running on Windows Server 2008 R2 or later. We know that many of you have legacy systems running early versions of Windows and we want you to know that you’ll still be able to monitor them just as you are doing now. The only change will be that your FrameFlow server will need to be running a 64-bit version of Windows.
The reward for moving to 64 bits will be faster performance coupled with easier data migration and the opportunity for us to deliver some really great new features as we move forward.
If you have any questions or concerns, get in touch with us as we’re always happy to help in any way we can.