I am currently using Laserfiche 9.2 Avante; however, I plan to upgrade to Laserfiche 10 Avante pretty soon. When that happens, I will also be adding the Laserfiche Forms module into the mix.
Right now, my Laserfiche server is also my terminal server where users RDP into from offsite. On a regular day, we have around 5 to 6 offsite users remoted in, taking up CPU usage, RAM, etc.
I would like to purchase a dedicated Laserfiche server prior to upgrading to 10, but should I purchase more?
The Forms module will be for internal use and external use. (External example: Other clinics sending referrals to us / Internal example: HR Onboarding)
The repository needs to be pretty robust, size-wise. I am at a specialty healthcare clinic (Pain Management), and we have a lot of patient data. I will have a folder for every patient, and several subfolders within a patient folder that categorize the different documents. Each patient has the ability to have anywhere from 10 to 15 subfolders, and several files within each subfolder. We probably have around 5000 active patients currently, and at any given time. After the patients discontinue their visits, I must still keep all their records for a minimum of seven years. But during that time, we will aquire a multitude of new patients.
I also have workflows set up for routing these files to the appropriate patient folder based on template and field entries. My workflow also creates links that I paste into our actual patient data application (McKesson Medisoft Clinical), so when the physicians click on that link within Clinical, it finds, navigates to, and opens that document in Laserfiche.
What kind of server would be best to handle this kind of data, and would it be wise to purchase another for the Forms module? Or will I need even more than that?
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How many actual servers do I need?
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Your Laserfiche reseller should be able to provide guidance with these types of questions. That said, here's what I'd suggest:
Laserfiche Server should definitely be on its own machine along with the Laserfiche volumes. This should be a different server than the SQL Server. We recommend keeping those two separate because SQL Server is very resource-intensive. If you're using SQL Express it might be OK, but at some point you'll want to upgrade if the system is going to grow.
So potentially, you're looking at three servers: the "Client" server, which is the server users RDP into and log into the repository from, the Laserfiche Server machine, which hosts the LFS service and the repository volumes, and the database server.
In scenarios where Forms will be accessible both internally and externally, and sensitive data is involved in the picture (i.e. patient data, which I assume is subject to HIPAA rules), we recommend creating a DMZ (which is its own, totally separate network) and putting the external-facing Forms server there. This server needs to be able to communicate to the internal SQL Server, as well as the Laserfiche Server. The DMZ Forms instance should share the same database as the internal Forms instance (although it doesn't have to if the external Forms business processes are totally different than the internal ones).
So, to summarize:
- The "client" RDP Server (what you currently have)
- The Laserfiche Server machine. Depending on the specs, it's OK to have this machine host Workflow services as well as the internal Forms server too
- The database server (this isn't required if you're on SQL Express)
- The DMZ server
Here's the thing though: it's not going to be cost-effective to buy separate physical server boxes for all of these. I'd recommend virtualization, which allows for much more efficient utilization of hardware resources. Essentially, you can buy one beefy server and run a bunch of virtual machines on it, and the VM host process can intelligently allocate the resources to each VM as necessary.