Hardware and Networking Requirements
Non-technical readers may well be tempted to skip this section. Before we let you off the hook please be aware that you will need to give your technical people a clear idea of how many users the system will have, what functions they will be carrying out, approximate current and projected data volumes and what peaks and troughs in concurrent usage are likely to occur so that they can adequately gauge these requirements.
It is very difficult to give generic advice about the hardware and networking requirements for implementing a new system. Some institutions will have existing computing and communications equipment that may be used to supplement newly purchased hardware, and organisations will often have policies regarding preferred technologies as part of their information system strategies.
Therefore, in order to gauge the amount and the type of hardware and networking facilities that will be required, and the typical costs of such items, institutions must rely heavily on the:
detailed specifications provided by manufacturers of hardware and networking facilities;
recommendations from the suppliers of the same systems at similar organisations;
experiences of the IT staff at those organisations, and;
knowledge of their own technical experts, particularly in relation to the computing environment and networking facilities that are currently in place.
One thing is certain, you should not underestimate the amount of hardware that will be required to provide the level of performance expected from a modern enterprise-wide system. Such systems now offer advanced relational databases, web-based functionality, complex graphical interfaces, ad hoc query capabilities, and sophisticated authentication and authorisation protocols, and support hundreds of simultaneous on-line users. In addition, without careful organisation and management, the organisation's data is likely to reach epic proportions, thereby adversely affecting system performance.
Furthermore, multiple copies of the database will be required for production (live running), training, test and development environments. These copies are known as database instances and, whilst each instance need not be a full copy of the production database, sufficient additional hardware will be required to house the different instances.
All of these factors combine to suggest that an institution will require as much hardware as it can afford. Accurate estimates of how much disk space, processor capacity, network bandwidth and hardware resilience and/or fault tolerance will be required are very difficult to arrive at because of the move from old processes to new methods without historical data being available. Software suppliers tend to make light of the need for adequate hardware because it increases the costs of buying and implementing their systems. However, users are often unhappy about the performance of a new system compared with an older one because highly-tuned terminal-based legacy systems often have very good performance characteristics. As well as the likelihood that an identical business process on a 'new' system will be running far more sub-processes, co-ordinating data within a relational structure and writing data to the audit logs, new systems usually require a great deal of tuning and therefore time to meet performance expectations. You should specify the proposed initial workload for the new system and estimate the increased workload over the proposed life of the system. Institutions should then ask system suppliers to indicate the minimum and the recommended hardware and networking specifications required to run their system for the initial workload and the anticipated hardware and networking changes that would be required to support the increased workload, and to explain in detail why they have recommended those specifications.
Communication and co-operation between all parties is required to ensure that sufficient hardware is purchased and a truly efficient configuration is installed.
