Best way to synchronize SmartTarget promotions across scaled Index Servers

Question

We have a scaled-out Content Deployer architecture: A single publication target with 2 destinations corresponding to deployers in separate data centres (each publishing to separate broker databases). We have connected each deployer to a Fredhopper Index Server, each of which has multiple Query Servers.

For publishing content this works OK, however promotions are created via the SmartTarget webservice, which is connected to a publication target and thus a single Index Server. As such we need to make sure that business.xml (which contains the promotion definition) and trigger-types.xml are sync'd from one Index Server to the other.

Is it possible to do this without stopping the second Index Server (and thus creating a blockage in the publishing process). Playing around with the export-capture and import-capture features, these seem to require an index stop/start, so I am wondering if there is another way?

We are using SmartTarget 2014 SP1.

Answer 1

This can be a really puzzling and interesting problem. What we did in our implementation is created script that copies business.xml file from one Indexer on Destination1 to indexer on Destination2. This is something that SDL implemented by themselves. Also, this copy/sync is done periodically (for us its one hour).

Hope it helps :)