Hardware requirements for CAST Imaging
Note that:
- hardware requirements depend on various factors related to the Application(s) you are analyzing and these must be considered:
- Number of lines of code (LOC)
- Number of objects after analysis
- Number of violations after analysis
- Technologies used
- Number of users accessing results
- due to the different factors that need to be considered, it is difficult to make precise hardware recommendations, therefore what we provide in this page is indicative only. We provide these figures as a guide to the absolute minimum required to run AIP Console and all required components, and your own configuration will likely require better hardware.
- using storage/disk with high IOPS values (i.e. SSD disks or SANs configured with SSD) will bring better performance. This is particularly true for servers hosting AIP Core/AIP Node and PostgreSQL components where faster storage will improve analysis performance.
- installations of AIP Core/AIP Node on servers with resources that are lower than the minimum required or that barely meet the minimum requirements will have the following limitations:
- analysis runtime and SQL operations will be sub-optimal
- you cannot run more than one application in parallel
- disk space can be quickly overloaded
On-premises
Multi-node (Large/Enterprise) - minimum requirements
With AIP Console v. 2.x
Component | Server type | Architecture | CPU | RAM | DISK | Common to AIP Nodes | OS | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CAST Imaging | Physical/virtual | 64-bit | Minimum 1 CPU / 2 cores:
Recommended 1 CPU / 4 cores:
| 16GB min, 32GB recommended. | 256GB (SSD recommended) | - | Windows or Linux |
|
AIP Core + AIP Node Service (back end) | Physical/virtual | 64-bit | 16GB min | 100GB (SSD recommended) | Delivery/Deploy/Common folders 512GB (SSD recommended) | Windows | RAM The batch files / Windows Service configurations provided for the AIP Node service are configured by default with conservative RAM provisions. See Configuring RAM for AIP Console front-end and AIP Nodes for more information about changing these. | |
AIP Console (front-end), including:
| Physical/virtual | 64-bit | 8GB min | 100GB (SSD recommended) | - | Windows or Linux | These items are all provided as Linux based Docker images in the public Docker Hub (.JAR file installs are also provided, however, these are targeted at deployments on Microsoft Windows on one single machine (including the AIP Node and the PostgreSQL instance) i.e. for demo or POC requirements). | |
PostgreSQL | Physical/virtual | 64-bit | 32GB min | 512GB (SSD recommended) | - | Windows or Linux | CAST highly recommends the use of PostgreSQL on a Linux instance as this consistently gives the best performance. | |
| CAST Extend local server (optional) | Physical/virtual | 64-bit | 4GB min | 64GB | - | Windows | It is possible to re-use one of the existing servers dedicated to AIP Core/AIP Node, providing that this is a Windows server, however CAST does recommend a dedicated server where possible. |
With AIP Console v. 1.x
Component | Server type | Architecture | CPU | RAM | DISK | OS | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CAST Imaging | Physical/virtual | 64-bit | Minimum 1 CPU / 2 cores:
Recommended 1 CPU / 4 cores:
| 16GB min, 32GB recommended. | 256GB (SSD recommended) | Windows or Linux |
|
AIP Core + AIP Node (back end) | Physical/virtual | 64-bit | 16GB min | 256GB (SSD recommended) | Windows | Disk space The recommended disk space takes into account space for the following folders hosted on the AIP Node:
You can refer to Deployment considerations for CAST Imaging for more information about this. RAM The batch files / Windows Service configurations provided for the AIP Node service are configured by default with conservative RAM provisions. See Configuring RAM for AIP Console front-end and AIP Nodes for more information about changing these. | |
AIP Console (front end) | Physical/virtual | 64-bit | 8GB min | 128GB | Windows or Linux | RAM The batch files / Windows Service configurations provided for the AIP Node service are configured by default with conservative RAM provisions. See Configuring RAM for AIP Console front-end and AIP Nodes for more information about changing these. | |
PostgreSQL | Physical/virtual | 64-bit | 32GB min | 512GB (SSD recommended) | Windows or Linux | CAST highly recommends the use of PostgreSQL on a Linux instance as this consistently gives the best performance. | |
| CAST Extend local server (optional) | Physical/virtual | 64-bit | 4GB min | 64GB | Windows | It is possible to re-use one of the existing servers dedicated to AIP Core/AIP Node, providing that this is a Windows server, however CAST does recommend a dedicated server where possible. |
Single server (Small/Testing)
Although it is possible to run all required packages and components from one single Windows server, CAST does not recommend this approach for “production” environments.
| Server type | Architecture | CPU | RAM | DISK | OS | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Physical/virtual | 64-bit | Minimum 1 CPU / 2 cores:
Recommended 1 CPU / 4 cores:
|
| 256GB min (SSD recommended) | Windows | 16GB RAM is the absolute minimum requirement to allow all packages and components to function, however, analysis performance will be poor as the available resources will be shared between the AIP Node and the CAST Storage Service and investigation performance in CAST Imaging may also be compromised. |
Example on-premises hardware configuration
Managing multiple applications
If you are managing a large number of applications, we recommend installing multiple AIP Nodes, one node per server to spread the load. The disk space allocated to a single AIP Node obviously depends on the size and the number of applications that will be analyzed by the AIP Node. In a situation where all the AIP Nodes are running analyses, some AIP Nodes may need to run more than one analysis in parallel. To avoid overloading the AIP Node where more than one analysis is running at the same time, we strongly recommend deploying servers with sufficient resources.
Therefore, to analyze up to 50 applications and to run up to 5 analysis in parallel on one single AIP Node with one associated PostgreSQL instance, CAST recommends increasing RAM and DISK resources as follows:
| Component | RAM | DISK |
|---|---|---|
| AIP Core + AIP Node (back end) | 32GB min | 2TB (SSD recommended) |
| PostgreSQL | 64GB min | 3TB (SSD recommended) |
You can distribute your applications across multiple PostgreSQL instances, as discussed in Which deployment architecture should you use?
Analyzing complex applications
While 90% of JEE, .NET or Mainframe applications can be analyzed with the minimum requirements, some specific (very large or not well balanced) applications require more memory than the minimum recommendations. The following configurations are examples of sizing required for very large applications. The requirements are not a linear function that are based purely on the number of files or lines of code (LoC), instead it is more complex and there is no specific formula to use.
In general, a lack of memory will cause slowness (servers will resort to the use of virtual space) in the best case, and a crash in the worst case. The numbers presented in the table below are purely indicative and depict the varying memory requirements.
For JEE, it does not include the Security for Java extension, which has specific RAM requirements.
| Application | AIP Node - CPU | Peak RAM used by analyzer | AIP Node - RAM (recommended minimum) | Disk space |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| JEE application with 13,000 java files and 6,300 JSP files | 2 processors, 4 cores | 22 GB | 32 GB | 256 GB |
| JEE application with 21,000 java files, 14 JSP files, 2,800 projects | 10 GB | 16 GB | ||
| JEE application with 30,000 java files and 1,200 JSP files | 12 GB | 16 GB | ||
| .NET application with 18,785 C# files | 12 GB | 16 GB | ||
| .NET application with 23,000 C# files and 4,100 cshtml files | 20 GB | 32 GB | ||
| Mainframe application with 10,000 COBOL programs | 2 GB | 8 GB |
Cloud services
Multi-node instance (Large/Enterprise) on Amazon Web Services (AWS)
The following requirements are based on CAST’s own testing for the analysis of a single “large Application”, using Amazon EC2 R5 Instances:
| Component | Minimum instance type | Volume Size | Volume Type | Minimum IOPS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CAST Imaging | r5.large | 256GB | General purpose SSD (gp2) or Provisioned IOPS SSD (io1) | 400 |
| AIP Core + AIP Node (back end) | 128GB | |||
| AIP Console (front end) | 256GB | |||
| PostgreSQL | 512GB | |||
| CAST Extend Offline or CAST Extend Proxy (optional) | 128GB |