SDL Tridion and SDL SmartTarget DTAP recommendations

Question

I'm looking for some advice on SDL SmartTarget DTAP recommendations. The concept of DTAP with SDL Tridion is relatively straightforward as per:

When reviewing the SDL SmartTarget documentation it discusses SmartTarget DTAP and provides the following diagram:

Although this is actually what is required in the SDL Tridion Production environment to implement SmartTarget correctly (minimum of four FAS machines supporting various roles).

To have full DTAP in the traditional sense, does this imply you require a similar SDL SmartTarget architecture on a per SDL Tridion environment? I'd imagine the machine count could be reduced (is that possible?) or reduced in capacity but are there any other considerations I should be taking into account? Or any recommendations regarding a full SDL Tridion and SDL SmartTarget DTAP architecture.

Many thanks

Answer 1

As with most things SDL you can scale out as you need requires.

My take on the Fredhopper DTAP diagram above is that its suited to (P)roduction scenarios (an outscaled example is decribed in the docs) where the emphasis is on dedicated query servers responding to application requests for content being separate from the indexing activity for published content. This requires replication of index data and config.

For (D)ev and (T)est/(A)cceptance environments you can host all Fredhoppers moving parts on single, dedicated servers or reuse your CD servers without the need for replication.