FACTS 7.7 server specs - AIX, VMWare

salbritton

We have a 64 user FACTS 7.3 customer (split between two primary locations) on AIX looking to upgrade to 7.7. Since Infor really hasn't "spec'd" servers for FACTS for a while (I think Ralph used to come up with some of the calculations/numbers they would use for hardware specs), the published hardware specs for an AIX server results in a $90,000-plus server if you follow the recommendations. Everyone we've dealt with seems to this server config would be massive overkill.

Does anyone out there who sells AIX with FACTS have any recommendations on appropriate specs for something like this? We seem to remember that something like a P6-520/4 core might be sufficient.

Any guidance would be appreciated.

Cheng Ruan

Hi Brad,

Marc Lee from support ran this question by me in September. While I'm no longer the "official source", here are my thoughts.

I was not involved with the 7.7 hardware guide specifications. If you look at the 7.6 version, we recommended a single core power5 running at 2.1 gHz for up to 50 users with a dual core configuration beyond that. You’ll note the “Large System” page where we referenced Progressive Lighting’s then new box which worked quite well for their huge number of users.

7.7 clearly requires more horsepower and memory, but it sure seems that recommending an eight way power7 (slowest clock is 3.5 gHz) is a bit of overkill for a 25 user system! I would think that a base 4 core power7 running at 3 gHz as seen here would suffice up to the under 100 user level.

www-03.ibm.com/.../

That is about four times the horsepower Progressive Lighting used for 300 users. Perhaps a six or eight way would be appropriate for a large system such as theirs with room to spare.

I bought a quad core i7-870 based desktop with 8 GB of memory about a year and a half ago for $1200 which has the computing power of a Cray 2 Supercomputer. We installed a similarly powered quad core Xeon based server for a new customer about the same time. Since we did some data conversion, I had to write a quick and dirty program to fix a flag for every entry in a 150,000 record ICWHSE file. I was training them that day and thought I would just get the update running and come back much later to check its progress. Run time? Two minutes. Two minutes!