System requirements

These are the system requirements for PlanetPress Connect 2020.2

Operating system (64-bit only)

• Microsoft Windows 2012/2012 R2 Server
• Microsoft Windows 2016 Server
• Microsoft Windows 2019 Server
• Microsoft Windows 8.1
• Microsoft Windows 10 (Pro and Enterprise versions only)

Virtual Environments

• VMWare/VSphere
• Hyper-V
• Azure
• Amazon Web Services (AWS). Note that only EC2 M4 was certified, other instances may not work as expected.

Minimum hardware requirements

As with any software application, minimum hardware requirements represent the most basic hardware on which the software will run. Note however that settling for the minimum specification is unlikely to produce the performance you expect from the system. It can be used when configuring a trial or a development system, however.

• File system: NTFS (FAT32 is not supported)
• CPU: multi-core
• RAM: 6GB
• Disk Space: 4GB for the software modules, 5GB for work files*

* This depends on the amount of data you process through OL Connect. For instance, a PostScript file containing several thousands of documents could easily take up several GBs.

Recommended hardware requirements

Due to its versatility, OL Connect is used for a wide variety of applications. Consequently, it is difficult to determine which hardware configuration will produce the best results for any given implementation. The following specs should therefore be viewed as a general guideline that is most likely to produce expected results for most implementations. You should, however, keep in mind that it may not represent the optimal setup for your particular application.

For more information and tips about performance considerations, see Performance considerations.

• File system: NTFS (FAT32 is not supported)
• CPU: Intel Core i7-4770 Haswell or equivalent
• RAM: 16GB
• Disk Space: 4GB for the software modules, 20GB for work files*¹
• Storage Type: Solid State Drive (SSD)
• Networking: 10Gb Ethernet

*¹ This depends on the amount of data you process through OL Connect. For instance, a PostScript file containing several thousands of documents could easily take up several GBs.

Requirements for individual Connect modules

OL Connect Products comprises multiple modules that can be operated separately on multiple PCs. Each module has its own set of requirements that may differ from the other modules. While the hardware requirements described above are relatively generic when installing all Connect modules on a single server, they should not be interpreted literally for each individual module.

When installing on multiple PCs, keep the following rules of thumb in mind:

• The Connect Workflow module requires less RAM but fast hard drive access. It also benefits from fast multi-core CPUs, in order to run processes in parallel.
• The Connect Server module requires more RAM and benefits from fast multi-core CPUs. Disk access speed is less of a concern.
• The Connect Designer module requires more RAM and fast disk access to provide a responsive user-experience.
• The back-end database (MySQL by default) benefits from more RAM, speedy disk access and fast networking as it will be solicited by all modules simultaneously.

Editions of Connect Products

There are three editions of OL Connect: PrintShop Mail Connect, PlanetPress Connect and PReS Connect.
While all three editions share common modules, they are generally not used for the same purposes. Technically speaking, their hardware requirements would therefore be the same but in practice, PReS Connect is likely to require higher-end hardware while PrintShop Mail Connect will generally require less power to achieve expected results.