Hi Neil,

I agree with you that the hardware is under spec for this project. What is not stated in the problem is management’s willingness to spend money to solve the problem. Fred and his team cannot determine the size of the problem until current performance is measured. Then using management based on facts and data they determine the best solution possible.
What would be the specs for the new server?
Questions, which need to be looked at, are:
1. What is the current workload?
2. What services are going to run on this server?
3. How much has this workload increased over a specific time?
4. Are there any additional factors to this server’s performance?
A classic example, we have a data server, which is running multiple database application, and running print services for the whole company. In the beginning the print services was only a few printers. However, over the year and half since the decision implemented, the number of printer has grown by 40 times. Yet management had the perception that because we purchased a “kick _ _ _” server there is no problem. However upon reviewing, the data collected during the base lining of the server’s performance we where able to change management perception of the server. Then using the data we where able to justify the monetary expenditure for the more memory,hard drives,etc,. Then we where able to justify the building of another server to handle the print server responsibilities. Sometimes when requesting money to solve problems you have to prove the problem exist and have the data to back up the request.


Andy