Ayoi’s

Last nite, wifey asked me to help her to prepare some simple network diagram for her proposal to this one partner. She had a meeting in the morning with this partner’s principal consultant (they are one of the software developers if I’m not mistaken) on the hardware and setup requirement that wifey’s company need to propose for this partner’s Business to Customer (B2C) online solutions. Basically this partner main intention is to reduce the amount of servers at their client site when providing their solutions. No problem with that but then when wifey blurt out the requirements and the must have components in her proposal, I start to think that this requirement is more on cost cutting measures in order to maximize this partner’s profit..

Basically, they require around 4 servers to host their web server, application, database and development. Additional condition that must be met by wifey’s proposals are (based on what wifey told me)

a). Fail Over capability

b). High Availability

c). Clustering

d). A DRC (Disaster Recovery Center)

Cool but then based on those requirements, how on earth you can reduce the amount of servers? As based on those, I believe the minimum amount of server shud be at least 7 servers. Ok now let we assume that this principal consultant just want a minimal High Availability Cluster (2 nodes), for his web, application and database. Meaning he needs at least minimum 3 servers to host those components and additional 3 servers on top of the existing one. Why? Because of High Availability and Clustering purpose. Agree?

But wait, those servers are only at the main site, how about the DRC (Disaster Recovery Center)? The purpose of having DRC is to ensure the continuity of the services offered. Ever heard about BCP? (Business Continuity Plan? Every single year our department will be harrassed by the Auditor on this mater ). Again at least whatever that you have in DRC must be the same with the ones that you have in your main site. And yeah I believe that the data must be synchronize between these two sites. Agree? For that case another 6 set of servers (if you are too concern with your money then maybe you can have the main servers there and pray that the recovery process of the main site will be done in light speed time. Just pray )

The best thing is, they want the basic feature (or I can call entry level) type of server to host all their applications. They have the intention to have application and database to reside in one server. That is no big deal actually but if the database application minimal requirement == the server hardware specification, do you believe that both the database and application will run smoothly? I have my doubt. It just like when you find out that your PC only meet the minimum requirement to have Windows Vista running on your machine. You can have that operating system installed in your machine, but then the performance will be not as good as PC that meet the recommended requirement. Rite?  Their reasoning is simple, they want to use the entry level first, then they will start to upgrade the hardware from time to time. Lol, then we can hear their customer complaints on the frequent down time of their services from time to time

Another weird thing is, when wifey asked about this partner’s application hardware requirement, they replied to wifey, “you should advice us on that.” Now that’s funny.

How on earth do she know the nature of your application, how many resources that it may consume per concurrent users either during the peak time or not. How many resources the application may consume for the maximum concurrent users accessing the application? Did they ever do any stress test or similar test for their application? I ain’t no a software developer, but from my experience mingling with those guys, the usual practice is these guys will give the hardware requirement to have their application or software running smoothly. I guess that’s why before you installing any software, you can see the minimum and recommended hardware requirement for that particular software? I don’t know about you but for me this sounds ridiculous.

My advice to wifey is, ask the partner to provide some information on their application. What are the minimum hardware requirement that their application required to run, what are the recommended requirement.To be honest, for a server that is running Intel Processor with 4 GB memory and only 160GB storage space to host your B2C software and database, I think it is questionable. What do you think.

Update : Thanks for kapla_hodot for informing me that there is some confusing phrase which needs elaboration. Sometimes my brain and my hand just not sync. I’ll blame the laptop’s keypad

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