What are the requirements for a server platform?

There are the following requirements for the server platform are as follows −

Volatility − Volatility computes the dynamic characteristics of the database. It includes areas like how often the database will be updated, how much data changes or is replaced each time, and how long the load window is. Daily data is more volatile than weekly or monthly data.

Customer churn rates can tell you how much your customer dimension will change over time. The interpretations to these questions have a direct force on the size and speed of the hardware platform. Data warehouses carry the complete brunt of both the business and technology curves. Business and technology are changing very quickly, and the data warehouse has to regulate both.

Number of business processes − The number of distinct business processes supported in the warehouse increases the complexity significantly. If the consumer population is large or the business justification powerful, it creates sense to have independent hardware platforms for each business process.

Nature of use − The nature of usage and the front-end tool choices also have an association with platform choice. Some active ad hoc users can an important strain on a data warehouse. It is difficult to optimize for this kind of use because good analysts are all over the map, looking for opportunities. On the other hand, a system that mostly generates push-button-style standard reports can be optimized around those reports.

Many of the reporting tools on the market provide for the scheduling of canned reports so they run in the early morning hours after the load is complete but before people arrive for work. This supports balancing the load by changing some standard reports into the off-peak hours.

Larger-scale data mining also establishes a large demand on the hardware platform, both in terms of data size and input-output scalability. These beasts need to suck in huge amounts of data, comb through it with the teeth of a good mining tool, and stream the results back out to support further analysis and downstream business uses. It is essential to learn the types of queries coming in because ad hoc use, reporting, and data mining all have multiple query profiles and can do better on multiple platforms.

Technical readiness − The server environment is the same as the CPU environment at a conceptual level, but it is very different at the implementation level.

Software availability − The requirements analysis will indicate a need for a certain capability, like a geographic information system that allows you to display warehouse data on a map. The software selection procedure can reveal that the best geographic mapping application for the specific requirements only runs on a specific high-end, graphics-based platform.