What do people think of this s/w vendors min specs?

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Jax

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#197911 17-Jun-2016 13:19

I am needing to quote some infrastructure for an on-prem app (nameless at this stage) but this new version has gone from running on 1 Server to 6:

2 x SQL (Always on cluster)
2 x Web Servers
2 x App servers
1 x Web Loadbalancer

The 50 -250 user specs read as follows:

SQL (must be Physical)

Dual Socket XEON current or immediately prior generation - Hex core or better 192 GB Minimum/256 GB recommended 15 x Write Resilient SSD 12Gbs drives + hot hot spares - At least two physical volumes for data and logs

Web (can be VM)

Dual Socket XEON current oir immediately prior generation - 6 core or better 192 GB RAM

App (can be VM)

Dual Socket XEON current or immediately prior generation - 6 core or better 192 GB RAM

What do you think of those RAM requirement? to factor in HA we're talking a lot of RAM!

nathan

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#1575729 17-Jun-2016 13:23

Without knowing all the details. There is always an element of how long is a piece of string.

50-250 users that sounds ridiculous and completely OTT

Turning up at 250 user site and saying you need 7 new servers!?

Pricing is often done on how much the market will bear. Especially if i have a crap app architecture and can hide behind that and milk it for as long as I can. (I.e. My customers are professional services peeps billing every 6 minutes)

So it depends...

timmmay

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#1575730 17-Jun-2016 13:24

Specifying a web server with 192GB RAM makes me suspicious. Nginx takes around 10MB RAM (maybe more under extreme load) and is super fast. App servers sure (within reason), db servers sure. Dual socket is also fairly hefty CPU.

What are you serving and to how many clients? It seems like it's specified for Internet scale.

wasabi2k

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#1575732 17-Jun-2016 13:26

Min Specs? Hilarious. Recommended Specs - sure, why not aim high.

We deal with the same thing, though not quite that bad. Most of our app vendors don't understand what an SSD is, so I have to fight to get them to understand they don't need RAID1 for their logs drive, nor do they have to worry about the number of spindles.

We recently had a system replacing a single VM, 2 vCPU, 16 GB with:

2 x SQL2014 VMs configured as AAG

1 x Tableau App

1 x Their Application

Specs for the above? 8vCPU + 96GB each. EACH. For a new version of the system previously hosted on a single VM (with replica for DR).

They don't seem to get that using more memory and CPU (and disk) to provide dashboarding and reports (NOT DATA WAREHOUSE) than the system it is reporting on is a little bit bananas.

edit: This vendor in particular ALWAYS blames our infra for performance related issues, despite being caught out numerous times with utterly diabolical SQL. The latest was them blaming storage latency for an application performance issue. Issue is they didn't know we recently put in an All flash array - and went quiet really quickly when we showed the graph showing storage latency peaking at 5ms.

nathan

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#1575735 17-Jun-2016 13:28

Does the customer need HA?

Jax

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#1576116 18-Jun-2016 10:30

Yeah I haven't had a chance to speak to the vendor yet - in fact when I called & tried was told "that's not really how we work" i,e me being able to talk to someone to clarify/quantify specs.

My client is actually closer to the 60 user mark. I am not sure yet how the web servers are used and the population it needs to serve.

I don't know if the app is written well or not, I believe it should be, the vendor is quite stringent on software versions and SQL setups, they have been around a long while.

And yeah, don't need to go HA for the SQL and Web (as they are clustered/balanced) and for the VMs I can use affinity to pin to hosts, but I did plan to put some other VMs on the hosts for which I would like HA.

Interesting comments, cheers

Edited: Also, SQL (Ent) licensing is pretty expensive in this design, in the order of NZ $100's k

timmmay

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#1576121 18-Jun-2016 10:39

The last solution I designed was originally spec'd with SQL Server Ent until I found out the price. Mostly wanted column level encryption. Ended up going with a cheaper solution that worked almost as well.