Assessing your requirements

To minimize rework and outages, take the time to study your current environment before you make installation and configuration decisions. Consider your current business requirements and design, the hardware and software already installed, and your current strengths and shortcomings. This planning could also help you minimize your financial investment.

Several factors determine your software needs. These factors can be organized into the following categories.

  • Product hardware and software requirements, your own system resource constraints, and the availability of resources to administer and maintain your system
  • Applications to be deployed to the runtime environment, and the intended use of the configured environment
  • Products, and the versions of these products, to install to meet your requirements
To make wise choices for all these factors, you must understand the following concepts:
  • The terminology as it applies to environment configuration
  • The administrative architecture of the product that you will install, configure, administer, and maintain
  • The available configuration options (through supplied patterns) and how to determine if a pattern addresses your intended use of the product
  • The supported methods of implementation, including an understanding of the different task flows for installing the product and configuring the environment

You can use the information in this section to assess and analyze your current and future requirements to develop an environment to meet those requirements.

Important: For the latest information about platform-specific disk space requirements, supported operating systems, and supported database versions, see IBM® Business Automation Workflow detailed system requirements. You can also find operating system fixes and patches that you must install to have a compliant operating system.