Agylen

Recently, we responded to an RFP which called for an enterprise application with a Web interface, RDBMS, the usual stuff. Since we needed to compete on costs also and the necessary server hardware, OS, appserver and DBMS licences were to be included in the bid, I suggested that we keep the hardware costs low by colocating the application server and the DBMS on the same machine.

I explained that this configuration was actually better, in terms of performance, than having app server and DBMS phisycally separated. Turns out that we won the bid, but now the customer is complaining that this cannot possibly be true, and that we should be using two servers instead of one. I suspect they want us to provide them both without changing the price.

Anyway, since it was me that suggested that configuration, I am being asked (by tomorrow morning!) to provide documented justification for the claim that colocating application and database server is better for performance. I will have to dig a quote from Ted Neward's blog, since I got the idea from there. I think I can find something relevant from Martin Fowler too.

While I'm searching, if you, dear reader, have some pointers to share, please leave me a comment.