Picking an Appropriate Target for Hosting

(Note: The following doesn't apply for you if you are using OT-BASE Cloud.)

Resource requirements

Your server platform should meet the following minimum resource requirements:

• 16 GB RAM
• Quad core CPU
• 10 GB free disk space.

It doesn't matter if you are running OT-BASE Asset Center on bare metal or in a virtualized environment. Even a private cloud (AWS, Azure etc.) is ok.

Software requirements

OT-BASE Asset Center comes as a Docker image and therefore requires the Docker container platform. If you are not familiar with Docker yet, information on this software can be found at www.docker.com. Cloud services usually provide pre-installed Docker servers.

You can install Docker (and OT-BASE) on Windows 10 or higher, but a Linux installation is a bit easier and therefore recommended.

Network placement

The following factors will help you to determine your decision on where to host OT-BASE Asset Center:

• If this is a proof-of-concept, you may place the OT-BASE Asset Center inside a process network, assuming that no external access is desired.
• If you want IT users to be able to access the OT-BASE Asset Center, a good hosting candidate is a computer inside the DMZ that separates process networks from office networks.
• If you want to collect configuration data from multiple sites in a central OT-BASE Asset Center, a hosting candidate would reside in the enterprise network that can be reached by all participating sites.

Summing up, placement of the OT-BASE Asset Center is largely determined by required access paths -- both for users and for configuration data provided by OT-BASE Asset Discovery nodes. For the latter, you only need to assure that Asset Discovery nodes can uni-directionally send files to the Asset Center. Such a connection may involve multiple steps with store-and-forward functionality in between. A direct online connection between Asset Discovery engines and the OT-BASE Asset Center is not required, and the transmission of configuration files is not time critical.