What Is Scalability?

Scalability is the ability of a system to expand to meet your business needs. You scale a system by adding extra hardware or by upgrading the existing hardware without changing much of the application. In the context of a BizTalk Server system, scalability refers to the ability of BizTalk to scale as your throughput needs increase, and if you need to reduce latency times.

After you optimize and tune various components of BizTalk, you might still encounter bottlenecks on BizTalk computers or on the MessageBox database. The types of bottlenecks that usually occur in BizTalk environments are CPU, memory, IO and lock contention bottlenecks. When you start to encounter bottlenecks, you may need to either upgrade the hardware or add new hardware into the existing topology. Fortunately, BizTalk Server architecture enables you to easily scale-up and scale-out. For example, you can add multiple BizTalk Server computers into the group and also add extra MessageBox databases.

See Also

Scaling Out the BizTalk Server Tier
Scaling Out the SQL Server Tier
Scaling Up the BizTalk Server Tier
Scaling Up the SQL Server Tier
Scaled-Out Receiving Hosts
Scaled-Out Processing Hosts
Scaled-Out Sending Hosts
Using Windows Server Cluster to Provide High Availability for BizTalk Server Hosts2
Scaled-Out Databases
Clustering the BizTalk Server Databases