Sensitive Data Governance: Hardware Specifications

Before you deploy Activate for Sensitive Data Governance, use these guidelines to select the appropriate hardware for your index server and content analyzer computer.

Hardware Specifications for the Index Server

Use these guidelines to select the appropriate hardware for your index server.

Considerations

  • If your environment is between two sizes, size up to the larger specification.

  • If you are using one Index Server for both files and email messages, use the size that matches the larger source. For example, if you have 40 TB of file source data and 15 TB of email source data, use the specification for a medium-sized server.

  • The following options affect the performance of the Index Server:

    • Custom entities that include multiple regular expressions

    • Data classification plans that include the optical character recognition (OCR) option or the pre-generated previews option

File Data and Email Messages

Component

Large

Medium

Small

File source data size per node*

160 TB

80 TB

40 TB

Email source application size

25 TB

15 TB

5 TB

File objects per node (estimated)

80 million

40 million

20 million

Email objects per node (estimated)**

250 million

150 million

50 million

CPU

32 cores

16 cores

8 cores

RAM

64 GB

32 GB

16 GB

Index disk space

(SSD class disk recommended)

12 TB

6 TB

3 TB

*Based on an average file size of 1 MB and on the assumption that 50 percent of documents are eligible for content indexing and there is only one version of the file. **Based on an average message size of 100 KB. Messages with attachments are considered a single object.

Specifications for Dedicated Servers for File Data

Component

Large

Medium

Small

Source data size per node*

160 TB

80 TB

40 TB

Objects per node (estimated)

80 million

40 million

20 million

CPU or vCPU

32 cores

16 cores

8 cores

RAM

64 GB

32 GB

16 GB

Index disk space

(SSD class disk recommended)

12 TB

6 TB

3 TB

*Based on an average file size of 1 MB and on the assumption that 50 percent of documents are eligible for content indexing and there is only one version of the file.

Specifications for Dedicated Servers for Email Messages

Component

Large

Medium

Small

Source application size

25 TB

15 TB

5 TB

Objects per node (estimated)*

250 million

150 million

50 million

Number of mailboxes**

5000

2000

400

CPU

16 cores

16 cores

8 cores

RAM

64 GB

32 GB

16 GB

Index disk space

(SSD class disk recommended)

10 TB

6 TB

2 TB

*Based on an average message size of 100 KB. Messages with attachments are considered a single object. **Based on an average mailbox size of 5 GB, and an average of 50,000 messages per mailbox.

Hardware Specifications for the Content Analyzer

Content analyzer computers detect personally identifiable information (PII) in the data. Some Activate environments require dedicated content analyzer computers.

Review the following use cases to determine if you need dedicated content analyzer computers:

  • You need to identify machine learning-based entities. For example, Address, Contextual Date, Location, Money, Organization, Person, and Time are entities that are identified by using machine learning. For a complete list of built-in entities, see Personally Identifiable Information.

  • You want to configure parallel processing. You can add multiple content analyzer computers, and then create a separate data classification plan for each content analyzer.

Before you install the Content Analyzer package, use the following guidelines to select the appropriate hardware for your content analyzer computers.

Use case

CPU

RAM

Disk space

Machine learning-based entities

32 cores

64 GB

2 TB

Parallel processing

16 cores

32 GB

1 TB

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