Flow System Requirements/System Sizing

Flow Software system sizing is a function of how much information you are gathering, but also what you are doing with the system. We encourage you to engage our team for input on your system architecture and sizing as it grows beyond your starter system.

Software Requirements

Operating Systems

Windows 10 64-Bit
Windows Server 2012 64-bit, 2012 R2 64-bit, 2016 64-bit, 2019 64-bit
Hyper-V and VMWare Virtualization supported

Additional operating system software

.NET Framework Runtime 4.8 or higher
.NET Core Runtime 3.1.x (x64)
- IIS is NOT required - Flow self-hosts it's report and dashboard server through .NET Core
Microsoft Universal C Runtime update #2999226
If connecting to AVEVA Historian prior to the 2017 version as a data source, you also will need Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2012 Update 4

3rd party software

Microsoft SQL Server 2014 / 2016 / 2017 / 2019 for the Flow configuration and operational data store database
- Express Edition acceptable for starter systems up to 100 measures and 10 events
- Standard Edition for small systems u pto 10,000 measures and 200 events
- Enterprise Edition for larger systems
Supported HTML5 Web Browsers for Reports and Dashboards
- Chrome
- Edge
- Safari

Hardware Requirements

Flow has been designed to scale with a distributed and modular architecture, but systems can be installed and deployed on a single machine or virtual, particularly for your first starter system or a demonstration/trial system. We have users with over 100,000 measures in a single Flow system, with a distributed virtual computing architecture supporting them.

For production Flow systems, here are some guidelines. Again, we encourage you to chat with us on any questions you might have about your specific system. When we say "machine" we also mean virtual machine instances.

Flow Config Application

Flow Config is typically run on a power user's laptop/desktop machine and is used to configure the Flow System. It is not recommended that Flow Config be run on the same machine as the Flow Components (engine(s), report server etc), nor the SQL Server and your IT team probably would agree from a security perspective. As a minimum, the following is recommended for a power user's machine:

Minimum of an Intel Core i5 processor
16 GB minimum memory
5 GB minimum free disk space
32-bit color depth recommended
1920 by 1080 screen resolution recommended

Flow Components (Data Engines, Integration Engines, Flow Server)

The Flow Components are designed to work across multiple server machines for load balancing purposes. For a Starter and Small Flow Systems, these components can typically be run on the same server machine.

For Large Flow Systems, these components should be distributed across more than one server machine. As Flow systems grow, it is easy to redeploy components to distributed systems, and due to the automatic backfill capabilities, there will be a pause in data collection, but data will not be lost, because Flow is retrieving from your historical/historian/database sources that should still have that data available.

As a minimum, the following is recommended for each Flow server machine:

Minimum of an Intel Core i7 processor
4 Cores, 2.0 GHz minimum CPU
32 GB minimum memory

SQL Database Server Hardware

Each Flow System requires a SQL Database to be hosted on a SQL Server. For a Starter or Small Flow System, it is possible to combine the SQL Database server with a Flow Component server. However, it is recommended that for Large Flow Systems, the SQL Database server be run on it's own dedicated server machine.

As a minimum, the following is recommended for the SQL Database server machine:

Minimum of an Intel Core i7 processor
4 Cores, 2.0 GHz minimum CPU

Starter Flow System (up to 1,000 measures and 10 events)

16 Gb minimum memory
100 Gb minimum free disk space at all times

Small Flow System: (up to 10,000 measures and 200 events)

32 GB minimum memory
200 GB minimum free disk space at all times

Large Flow System (over 10,000 measures and 200 events)

64 GB minimum memory
500 GB minimum free disk space at all times