To maximize the return on investment in enterprise Yield management software and resources, the choice of an optimal IT hardware configuration is essential.
The factors to consider are essentially: user access modes, data security, application performance, existing environment, and others.
The current push towards centralized applications on remotely accessed hosts, often conflicts with goals of customizability and high performance for advanced users. Centralized data storage presents risks of unauthorized access, despite efforts to enforce user security. Analysis of complex problems often requires extensive data manipulation and correlation, but delays in GUI or data transfers reduces usability and productivity. Re-using existing infrastructure appears attractive but is rarely aligned with recommend high performance requirements.
Local infrastructure configurations are typical for existing applications, but also have significant drawbacks: data and resource duplication, complex correlation of data spread across sites, unmanaged version differences, diverging usecase requirements.
The optimal solution is to centralize logically by group, and distribute physically by region, and ensure that cross-references and compatibility are maintained. Applications must be multi-site enabled, but a high ratio of analyses will use local data only. Deploying application servers close to end users ensures excellent responsiveness and provide excellent performance, with significant RAM and fast disk and multi-CPU availability, as long as the number of concurrent users is set appropriately.
The hardare requirements evolve over time, so servers which are multi-purpose ensure the most flexibility to reconfigure and adapt quickly.