Scalable and compatible

Visual Weather offers unmatched flexibility and scalability and is designed for various meteorological applications. Its architecture supports multiple data formats, ensuring seamless integration with diverse tools and environments.

You can start with standalone single computer setup, and further extend it through client-server architecture utilising both thick client or remote desktop connections.

Visual Weather is flexible!

Visual Weather is designed with robust scalability options and remarkable flexibility, making it suitable for a wide range of meteorological applications. The system's flexible architecture supports various data input and output formats, enabling seamless integration with diverse meteorological tools and environments. This adaptability allows users to tailor the system to their specific needs, whether for small-scale operations or large, complex networks.

Standalone Workstation

Standalone workstations are the simplest Visual Weather deployment option. Whole system is running from the single system - server or desktop workstation. It is usually combined with the remote desktop solution.

Client-Server

The client-server approach is the most common way of deployment. In this case, Visual Weather is used in two perspectives:

Visual Weather Server - server software responsible for collecting, processing and storing meteorological data, creating derived products from this data and performing automated tasks. It also serves as a configuration and metadata database. Typically, only administrators and configuration managers work directly on the Visual Weather Server.
Visual Weather Client - workstation software for meteorologists to visualise and analyse data and create forecast products with added value (charts, text messages, tabular values, composite products, etc.). Visual Weather Clients have to be connected to the Visual Weather Server.

A typical installation consists of one server and multiple client workstations connected to the server. A single server can process hundreds of GB of meteorological data per day and can serve approximately 15 client workstations. These numbers vary depending on the data access patterns.

Hybrid Client-Server

Visual Weather Server supports a special mode of operation by utilising the hybrid database connection.

Architecture advantages:

Each hybrid server can effectively serve the same data as the primary server, potentially even joining multiple server databases into one
The data is retrieved from the server on-demand or can be pre-cached on the hybrid server to avoid download time
The architecture allows for horizontal scalability, as adding another client is simple.

This architecture is typically deployed in the following scenarios:

Server in a remote office, connected via a slow link to the main office (see next chapter)
Intermediate server for serving a larger amount of clients than the main server can handle
Creating a collaborative batch production network

Active-Active Server

For load-balancing and high availability of large-scale automated batch production, the active-active server architecture can be deployed.

This architecture allows for a second server to function in the same role as the primary server and perform identical tasks.

Additionally, a collaborative batch production network can be deployed among the servers. This allows to utilise resources by distributing the batch production, providing

increased resilience: jobs which are not executed on a node due to system failure will be re-executed on another node.
Load-balancing: all nodes in the collaborative network take jobs from a common queue – executing a job successfully on whichever node will cause that job to be removed from the common queue, i.e. other nodes will not execute it again.

Remote Desktop Solutions

Remote desktop is recommended on WAN networks or, generally, on networks with lower bandwidth and higher latency. Visual Weather supports most common remote desktop solutions, including:

Microsoft Remote Desktop
ThinLinc - a solution based on VNC
Nomachine Terminal Server - remote desktop solution using custom protocol