Tulip On-Premise Basics

Purpose

Here's what you need to know if you want to deploy Tulip on-premises.

Notice: Tulip has announced End of Life for traditional On-Premise deployments.

If you are unable to run Tulip as a managed service, please contact your Tulip representative to discuss hosting a Tulip instance within your private AWS or Azure account

If you are currently an On-Premise customer, LTS 5 is the last version supported. Support for LTS 5 ends in April 2022.

Tulip is primarily deployed as a cloud-based solution to ensure security, performance and reliability. However, certain industries and markets have regulatory requirements that force them to use software that runs on-premise (within their own internal network).

For these cases, Tulip has created an on-premise version of its cloud-based solution. On-premise projects are evaluated on a case by case basis and are significantly more difficult to deploy and support. There are two overall strategies for on-premise installations:

1. An installation onto a server within (or accessible by) your company's network.
2. A single dedicated computer, either provided by Tulip or by you, our customer.

The first option is the recommended configuration for long-term support and scalability, however the second option is often faster to deploy for a Proof-of-Concept project. A Tulip team member can help you weigh the options for your particular situation.

Difficulties with On-Premise Installations

While sometimes necessary, on-premise installations have several drawbacks:

• **Reduced support **- It is difficult for Tulip to offer the same level of support as cloud deployments. Our cloud deployments are constantly monitored for performance issues and our team often responds to issues before our customers are even able to notice problems.
• Delays in upgrading - Tulip cloud deployments are able to easily choose the frequency with which they receive updates and new features. While Tulip always ensures that security concerns are dealt with promptly, new features and bug-fixes are updated more slowly in on-premise installations.
• Reduced Reliability - Digital systems are only as reliable as the infrastructure upon which they run. Tulip works only with the highest quality vendors to ensure maximum uptime and performance for our cloud infrastructure. On-premise infrastructure rarely exceeds the reliability of Tulip's cloud providers.

Technical Specifications

Below are the minimum requirements for running the Tulip platform on-premise.

This type of configuration should support up to 10 standard stations for 1 year. More frequent and complex triggers, large amounts of data collection, and large in-app multimedia assets will all reduce the performance of the platform. If a customer suspects that this is an issue, it is critical for the customer to provide an environment that can easily be upgraded with more storage space and processing power.

Computation

The minimum requirement for computation for an on-premise installation is:

• 4 Core CPU
• 3.5 GHz clock speed
• 8MB Cache

Hard Drive Capacity

The minimum requirement for hard drive capacity for an on-premise installation is:

• 500GB SSD

This space must be accessible on the / and /var mount points on a Linux Server running one of the recommended operating systems.

RAM

The minimum requirement for RAM for an on-premise installation is:

• 16GB

Networking

Strong networking is the backbone of a digital factory. On-premise solutions benefit from local networking, but it is still worth mentioning that all routers and networking hardware should use the most modern standards and be capable of at least 1Gbps.

The Tulip Server will require both a Static IP as well as a local DNS entry that is resolvable on the relevant networks. If using a Tulip-provided SSL certificate, the hostname must be within the tulip.co domain.

Ports

The only ports required to be open on the network are ports 80 (TLS) and 443 (TLS). These ports must be open for the edge device (the computer, tablet, or I/O Gateway, Edge IO, Edge MC) to send outgoing requests to the host server.

Tulip is additionally able to offer some support for customers running on-premise if the host server is reachable on ports 32009 and 61009. Access on these ports allow the Tulip team to monitor the performance of your system and provide support.

Operating System

Tulip can run on the following operating systems:

• Ubuntu - 14.04, 16.04, and 17.04
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux - 7.4, 7.5, and 7.7

The recommended configuration is Ubuntu 16.04.

Recommended Hardware

If running Tulip on a single, dedicated computer, Tulip recommends an Intel NUC i7 with part number: NUC7i7BNH, a NVMe 500gb SSD and 16GB of DDR3 RAM.