Re: How to recommend hardware to customers?

I don't think hardware recommendations should be tied that closely to the application.

With today's inexpensive computers, the decision should be based on business requirements, and what they can afford. The considerations should be more in the lines of - do you need RAID? Is this app or number of users likely to grow ? Does the customer want a brand name ? How will the hardware be supported ?

Software companies typically specify only a "minimal" config that the app will run on. This "minimal" should be based on currently available hardware - it makes no sense to ask a customer to get anything less than a 1 GHZ PC, or less than 512M RAM or less than 40G disk. If your app runs on that, fine - set that as the minimum - if not, bump up the appropriate numbers.

Earth first! (We'll rob the other planets later)

Comment on Re: How to recommend hardware to customers?

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Re^2: How to recommend hardware to customers? by Jaap (Curate) on Oct 23, 2004 at 09:42 UTC
I agree. All you can say to a customer is: You need at least n MB of RAM. As for all other components: the best you can do is give a scale-factor for it. That is: A CPU twice as fast will make the access time 1.3 times as short, or something like that.	[reply]