Buying a new laptop purely for Hyperion Planning (Self study @ home)

Question

Hi Guys,
I am going to buy a laptop/desktop which I am going to dedicate purely towards learning Planning v11 (1 user at home :D ).
I don't want to buy a desktop because laptop is more convinient. I was thinking of getting one of the Alienware laptops with the following specs :
Intel® Core™ i7 Processor 870 (2.93GHz, 8MB)
Windows® 7 Home Premium 64bit- English
12GB RAM (2x4096 + 2x2GB) 1333MHz DDR3 Dual Channel Memory
320GB Serial ATA (7200RPM) Hard Drive edit
1GB ATI® Radeon™ HD 5450 graphics card
DVD +/- RW Drive
I plan to install all EPM suite onto this, is this good enough specs or do I need to add anything more as in more RAM, different OS ? I would also be installing Oracle 11 onto this as well. I will then have my Excel whereas Ill have the smartview/add in to work on it. You could call this both server/client machine.
I chose Alienware as I though they are a good build. If anyone feels that there can be other brands, please let me know. I know maybe I am spending a bit too much but I tend to be a bit serious about my learning.
Any help will be much appreciated.
Edited by: N13 on 23-Dec-2010 14:48
Added version needed and updated specs
Edited by: N13 on 24-Dec-2010 04:32

Answer 1

Have you thought about going to the cloud?
As TimG pointed out above, I went down your path thinking I could install and run 11.1.2 in a VM on a 8 GB machine (Windows 2008 64 bit OS on that VM). Nope. The services start up, but the machine is completely unusable. I even tried installing on bare metal on a swap out hard drive to get rid of the VM overhead. Alas, it still wasn't sufficient -- I have to be able to click on something and not watch the hard drive LED go a solid blue for 3 minutes. Arrgh. It is possible that Oracle didn't design 11.1.2 to work on a single laptop. What on earth were they thinking? :)
I had this touching bit of naivete because I was (and am) successfully running the 11.1.1.3 EPM stack (Essbase, SS, Workspace, EPMA, Calc Manager, Planning, Financial Reports, APS, EAS, and ODI) quite comfortably in a 32 bit Windows 2003 4 GB VM Ware session. I really like the flexibility of a Windows 7 (laptop in my case) host OS to do "normal" things and then multiple VMs to do POCs, use different releases of client software, etc. It's a very productive environment.
Unfortunately, 8 GB isn't sufficient for the full EPM stack. You can definitely run Essbase, APS, EAS and whatever other client tools you need, e.g., Excel, Dodeca, etc. in 8 GB.
However, as I needed more than just Essbase and 16 GB laptops get excitingly expensive, I ended up going down the cloud computing path. You can tap into as much RAM and CPU as required and the learning curve isn't very steep. It's definitely not as convenient as VM Ware, but it's pretty close. As I am an installation idiot, I went with a company called Full360.com (no, I don't work for them) who provide a EPM 11.1.2 Amazon Machine Image that you can fire up at will, create private copies of, attach 1 terabyte hard drives to, etc., etc. It's like a server room in the sky. Of course this all isn't free, but if you read my blog's analysis, you'll see that it's equivalent to buying a new mid range laptop every three years.
Re that last point -- I was really tempted to just go ahead and buy that 16 GB laptop (Lenovo has one that is "reasonably" priced as opposed to Dell's highway robbery -- it's all down to the RAM slots and the price of 8 GB DIMMs-- Lenovo has four, Dell has two) but realized that while 11.1.2 might run, today, in 16 GB who knows what 11.2 or 12.1 or whatever might require. I am out of the business of sizing a laptop -- if Oracle EPM 14.5 requires 32 GB of server -- I've got it thanks to Amazon Cloud Computing (no, I don't work for them either).
There are other cloud options out there: GoGrid, Rackspace, and even Oracle itself not to mention all of the consulting companies that offer hosted environments. I don't think, however, that the Oracle/consulting company products are for individuals to learn on -- the Full360 product is.
I'm going to have another blog (I literally have five being written in parallel -- I am in blog thrash mode) post up soon detailing the real world challenges I've encountered using EPM in the cloud and there are still some issues like security that I don't fully understand (to say that infrastructure is not my thing is to be kind), but all in all, I'm quite happy with the path that I've taken.
If you have any questions, feel free to ping me on LinkedIn or on this thread.
Regards,
Cameron Lackpour
P.S. This has got to be the longest OTN reply I have ever posted.
P.P.S. I will copresent (along with Full360) on EPM in the cloud at ODTUG's Kaleidoscope 2011 conference in Long Beach, CA in June of next year. I will be a veteran user of the product by then and should "have all the answers" at that point.
Edited by: CL on Dec 24, 2010 10:13 AM
To shamelessly plug ODTUG Kaleidoscope.