MicroStrategy Analytics Enterprise with SQL Server Standard (25 users)
MicroStrategy | 9s (9.5)Windows, Windows Server 2012 w/SQL Standard 2012 2012 - 64-bit Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
Easy to launch fully functional MSTR environment. A+
Hello world.
I stood up an AWS MSTR 9s 25-User instance about 2 weeks ago to run some Demos for my new business. Creating the instance and configuring the network security rules was a breeze. After a few minutes the instance started up and was ready to go. Right out of the box all of the main MSTR components were working. These include I-Server, Web ASP, Mobile ASP, and Developer, along with SQL Server Management Studio. I was able to connect to these components easily from respective devices outside the cloud including my laptop (remote desktop+Web) & mobile devices (iOS+Android). Only annoyance was without elastic IP associated, mobile configs need to be reconfigured upon each machine restart since public IP of instance changes. Associating elastic (static) public IP resolves this.
Within 2 weeks I have connected MSTR in the Cloud to my data WH, built out 2 MSTR schemas, and created 2 working demos for prospective clients. Note that I am a 1-man team. One of these demos was a Visual Insight dashboard and the other was a mobile document. The mobile document led to my first successful customer contract today. If you know your way around the MSTR platform, you can build out fast with this setup.
The one criticism I would give to the setup is that ALL MSTR components are installed on a single Windows Server 2012 Instance. This greatly limits the use of the platform as a Production solution, and makes this better suited as a Demo environment. I would recommend the AWS team to develop a solution that spins up 3 servers: (1) a linux server with I-Server/Web server/mobile server installed and (2) a Windows server with Developer/Architect/Object Manager/Tools and (3) a DB server with choice of DB - maybe choice between costly service like SQL Server and cheap service like MySQL.
Conclusions:
For Production environment, this setup is not robust enough. For example - what would be the point of setting up a 1000+ User Environment with all MSTR components installed on same server? This system would not perform well. Offer a large-scale AWS cloud solution robust enough for large PROD environments, or don't offer a large-scale solution at all. I bet not many people have signed up for the 100+ user environments, because they are all probably using the smaller environments for demos like me.
As a Demo server setup, I am extremely satisfied with the value of this service. I recommend keeping this service around for existing deployments of 9s, and recommend releasing a MSTR 10 AMI as well. The current pricing is appropriate given that these environments are suitable for Demos. For the higher-price, higher-user environments, I would recommend to provide a more robust set up to be able to support the load of a large-scale PROD environment.
Overall thanks for this offering! It is a step in the RIGHT direction!
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Charged for free trial - beware
Watch the fine print. This is no free trial. Was charged $16 a day to trial this software and that's just the software charge.