The architecture of Meridian Enterprise is flexible so that it can be deployed in various configurations to meet a wide range of organization sizes and requirements from small workgroups to large enterprises. Each configuration has inherent advantages and disadvantages in terms of:
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                                                    Load — from a small departmental productivity tool to a mission-critical enterprise system with many users and documents. 
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                                                    Reliability — whether all components are hosted on a single server or some components are hosted by dedicated, fail-safe systems. 
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                                                    Systems management — distributing components to other servers distributes administrative responsibilities correspondingly. 
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                                                    Geography — whether data resides in a single vault or many vaults distributed globally. 
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                                                    Functionality — from out-of-the-box basic tools to custom data structures and unique functionality. 
The following topics discuss basic strategies for designing a deployment configuration and give several models from which similar configurations can be based.
