Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Dear Mr. Customer...

I realize you would like [ENTERPRISE EDITION LARGE SOFTWARE PACKAGE] on all of your servers for this application, but our standards for supporting these servers in this configuration specify that [STANDARD EDITION LARGE SOFTWARE PACKAGE], should be used.

You have indicated that perhaps at some time in the future, you would like to be able to add memory to these servers, and therefore require [ENTERPRISE EDITION LARGE SOFTWARE PACKAGE].

Unfortunately, you can't add any more memory to these servers. They are 2 processor blades, and the maximum supported memory is 4gb. You could technically install more memory, but it isn't supported. If [APPLICATION] would ever need more memory than 4gb, it needs to be built on a larger platform like a [MAJOR VENDOR 2 PROCESSOR RACK SERVER].

I understand you would like to build the systems with [ENTERPRISE EDITION LARGE SOFTWARE PACKAGE] for commonality of support; but the only support difference, is that [ENTERPRISE EDITION LARGE SOFTWARE PACKAGE] supports more than 500 client connections per server, more than 2 cpus, and more than 4GB of RAM. Well, that, and it costs about $3,000 more per server, and the software maintenance charges are higher.

To summarize:

1. There is no technical requirement to install [ENTERPRISE EDITION LARGE SOFTWARE PACKAGE] on these blades.

2. It is against enterprise architecture standards to install [ENTERPRISE EDITION LARGE SOFTWARE PACKAGE] on these blades.

3. There is no possible advantage to installing [ENTERPRISE EDITION LARGE SOFTWARE PACKAGE] on these blades, because these systems can't take advantage of the additional capability.

4. There is no disadvantage to NOT installing [ENTERPRISE EDITION LARGE SOFTWARE PACKAGE] on these blades, because these systems can't take advantage of the additional capability.

5. It costs significantly more to install [ENTERPRISE EDITION LARGE SOFTWARE PACKAGE] on these blades (approximately 50% more total software cost added to each blade).

6. It costs somewhat more to support [ENTERPRISE EDITION LARGE SOFTWARE PACKAGE] on these blades.

Given these considerations, I restate my recommendation that these blades be installed with [STANDARD EDITION LARGE SOFTWARE PACKAGE]; and ask that this decision be re-considered. I await the final decision.

Cheers,

Chris Byrne
Sr. Infrastructure Architect