Analytical Model for Cluster Services of Flexible Enterprise Resource Planning Systems

An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is defined as a unified information system, performing all information processing tasks of a company and realizing an integration of the whole corporation. This paper explains the software architecture for ERP system firstly. Secondly, describes the architecture for cluster services of the flexible ERP system, which is composed of front-end Web servers, application servers and backend database servers, and then an availability model for cluster services is designed and analyzed exhaustively. According to queueing theory, we obtain closed form equations for cluster service availability, for which sensitivity analyses are conducted in detail. Finally, the result achieved form this model can help ERP designers find the right tradeoffs for achieving availability of users expected while providing acceptable levels of performance.