We are frequently asked what the minimum and recommended server specifications are for BI products. The following is a rough guide:


BI Servers are inevitably memory-bound, there is a heavy demand on memory from any modern in memory BI toolset (Qlik, Tableau and Spotfire all fall into this camp). Typically therefore we recommend that a very minimum of 16GB of memory is allocated, although this will quickly be exhausted as analytics servers and BI dashboards are used more intensively or more data is loaded into RAM.


Base spec (starting out):

  • 24GB RAM, 180GB HD, 4-core processor
  • Virtualised is fine however ensure the instance has memory priority in a shared resource environment
  • Windows 2012 R2 Server ideal (previous operating systems back to Win2008 R2 will work)

Standard BI server spec (up to 75 users, up to 5 different medium datasets/dashboards in use):
  • 64GB RAM, 250GB HD, 4-core processor
  • Ideally physical server but virtualised will work
  • Windows 2012 R2 Server ideal (previous operating systems back to Win2008 R2 will work)


Large BI server spec (up to 250 users, up to 10 different large datasets/dashboards in use):

  • 128GB RAM, 250GB SSD, 8-core processor
  • Ideally physical serverĀ 
  • Windows 2012 R2 Server ideal (previous operating systems back to Win2008 R2 will work)

Enterprise BI server spec (up to 1,000 users, up to 20 different large datasets/dashboards in use):

  • 256GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 16-core processor
  • Ideally physical serverĀ 
  • Windows 2012 R2 Server ideal (previous operating systems back to Win2008 R2 will work)



Above these specifications, it is worth considering scaling horizontally and sharing load - please contact us to discuss the best approach.