Standard StarTeam Architecture Overview

The standard architecture represents the minimal components present in a StarTeam instance: a StarTeam Server process managing a vault and a database and one or more StarTeam clients. With just these components, all basic StarTeam functionality is available. The core components of the standard StarTeam architecture are depicted below.

StarTeam employs a client/server architecture. The StarTeam Cross-Platform Client, Server Administration tool, and StarTeam Command Line Tools are examples of bundled StarTeam clients. StarTeam clients use the freely available StarTeam SDK, so you can write custom applications that have access to the same features as the bundled clients. The SDK is fully featured in Java, .NET, and COM, allowing you to write custom applications for any environment. A single StarTeam client can have multiple sessions to any number of StarTeam Servers.

All StarTeam clients connect to a StarTeam Server process using TCP/IP, so virtually any kind of network can be used: LAN, WAN, VPN, or the public Internet. StarTeam uses a proprietary protocol called the command API, which supports compression and multiple levels of encryption. The command API has been optimized to support high performance, automatic reconnect, delta check-out for slow connections, and other important features.

A single deployment instance of StarTeam is known as a server configuration, usually shortened to just configuration. The persistent data of a configuration consists of a database and a vault and is managed by a single StarTeam Server process. The database holds all metadata and non-file artifacts, whereas file contents are stored in the vault. The database can be any of the supported databases and it can reside on the same machine as the StarTeam Server process or a separate machine. The StarTeam database and vault can be backed-up dynamically, while the server is in use. This supports 24 x 7 operations that want to minimize down time.

StarTeam’s vault is a critical component that affects performance and scalability. In contrast to the traditional delta storage technique, StarTeam’s vault uses an innovative architecture designed for scalability, performance, high availability, and dynamic expandability. Today, customers are storing up to a terabyte of data in a single StarTeam vault, but it was designed to store content up to a petabyte and beyond.

Within the vault, files are stored in containers known as hives. A hive is a folder tree containing archive and cache files on a single disk volume. Hives can be dynamically added on existing or new disk volumes, thereby allowing virtually unlimited capacity. StarTeam stores each file revision in a separate archive file in a manner that minimizes space usage as well as duplicate content. StarTeam’s vault uses less space than delta-based storage. In certain cases where it is more economical to send file deltas to clients instead of full versions, StarTeam generates and caches delta files. However, in most cases sending full versions is more economical.