Ideasoft O3's Hardware & Software requirements

The purpose of this document is to provide information regarding hardware and software characteristics for Ideasoft O3. This document is targeted to IT staff who should decide which is the best equipment to use for the product instalation.

Document organization

The fisrt section states the Hardware requirements fot the O3 instalation, explaining the necessary resources in detail.

The second section provides sample metrics for specific datamarts requirements. These metrics include Hard Disc requirements, and memory configuration.

Notice that the metrics in this docuemnt should be considered only as a reference. It should not be taken as a general definition of the resources used by each datamart.

Hardware Requirements

Environments classification

Ideasoft O3 is a very flexible product that can be used on several scenarios with a variety of usage contexts. The product suits various needs due to it's advanced technical characteristics such technological platform, powefull multidimensional algorithms, and the design of a set of mechanisms to provide high scalability.

It is necessary to consider the breadth of scenarios to identify the environment for which the instalation should be designed, in order to give hardware recomendations. It is also recommended to consider what the purpose of the instalation is, as the instalation may be directed to high demand scenarios or ar the other end, for individual use in a laptop, or simple usage cases evaluation, etc.

Another element to consider is the scalability of the infrastructure. As hardware technology evolvs, high scalability equipment is offered, thus the selection of specific hardware should take advantage of this tendency. The best investment in software and hardware is not only the one that best suits current needs, but also anticipates future ones. On the other hand, over-sizing a server in early stages will affect the ROI without providing a specific outcome.

For these reasons, we will not only recommend affordable equipments but also the scalability characteristics that should be taken into account in specific scenarios. O3 is prepared to extensively exploit the capability of scaling the architecture of modern hardware both with respect to multiple cores, memory, high-speed networks and clusters.

It should also be taken into account the number of O3 components that will be in production. For example, the use of O3 Enterprise Portal or Web Customers will place greater demands on resources on the server box, but fewer requirements on the client side. In contrast, an installation that uses only the server and clients multidimensional Desktop will require significantly fewer resources at the server (for example, reduced memory consumption on the server).

Another factor that must be analyzed is the usage pattern, such as the use frequency, the distribution of queries over periods of time and the maximum load.

Finally, the amount of information actually stored in the Datamarts, the complexity of the multidimensional models and other factors related to the data, have a direct impact on hardware requirements.

It is very difficult to make a general recommendation that consider all of these variables, so we have summarized them in three cases.

O3 Server

The following information explain in details the server box requirements to run O3Server. Usually the datamarts are build on this box, therefore, the O3Builder component should also be installed on it. Its operation does not interfere with the server as its heavier load is scheduled during hours of very low or inexistent O3 Server activity. If not so, it is possible to configure and license the use of O3Builder in other specific computer.

While there is no real requirement of having a dedicated server for this purpose, it is not recommended to share it with other programs with high memory or processor needs, such as a database engine.

O3Server requirements

The server must be configured according to the volume of information and the maximum number of simultaneous users working on it.

The values shown on the following table, represent a guide to identify the minimum requierements.

see the Example of Datamart Requirements for complementary disk usage information.

Operating System

As a general criterion, O3 can be run in any OS that supports an up-to-date Java 1.5 virtual machine.

Specifically, operating systems currently supported are:

• Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 2003
• Open Suse Linux 10.3, 11.
• Fedora 7
• Solaris 10.
• RedHat RHEL 5.x

Web Client

The Web Client is the O3 access through an Internet browser. It requires a computer able to run any of the Internet browser soported by O3. It is not necessary to install any O3 component on these computers.

The hardware requirements are those required in order to run efficiently the Internet browser of the user's preference. Consideration should be given that such requirements depend on the number of simultaneous applications that the user uses for his job.

The Web Browsers supported by O3 are:

Desktop Client

The Client Desktop O3 is an application that is installed on the user's PC or laptop and can be used in two ways:

• Client/Server: The Desktop Client connects to an O3Server to work with Datamarts, Scorecards, and so on.
• Desktop Standalone: The Desktop Client executes queries to local Datamarts. These datamarts are stored locally or copied to the user's PC or Laptop through the Sincronizing process

Requirements for the Client/Server option:

Requirements for the Standalone option:

In this case you must contemplate the disk space required by the Datamarts.

O3 Studio

The requirements of O3's development environment are:

In this case you must contemplate the disk space required by the Datamarts.

Datamarts Requirements Example

This section describes specific needed resources. Note that these values should be used as a reference only.

Datamarts Size factors

The Datamarts store information from different data sources. During the loading process, O3 performs a set of optimizations and transformations, which have several consequences:

• The information is highly compressed because they are compact representations of information (compared with relational databases, files, etc.)
• As aggregations are performed, the information in the DataMart does not have the same detail as in the original sources, so for each record actually stored in the DataMart, O3 may have loaded several records of the sources. This factor also contributes to the compression of information.
• To improve the query, some Datamarts are designed to perform a set of calculations (controlled redundancy), which increases the information stored in the DataMart.
• Only a portion of the information in the databases is actuallly used by Datamarts.

As a general rule, the Datamarts show rates of compression of the information they store, requiring less storage space than the databases that originate the information.

Datamarts Size