A "balanced" hardware configuration is one that has no clear performance bottleneck. In a balanced configuration, CPUs can process at maximum performance while there is little to no surplus capacity in other resources. A balanced configuration gives you maximum return for your investment.

Today's multi-core CPUs process data extremely fast and most configurations cannot provide sufficient disk IO bandwidth to feed CPUs. For practical, non-benchmark configurations, the in-memory column buffer mitigates the need for sufficient storage bandwidth to keep all cores busy at any point in time. Configure a system to allow for a lot of query execution memory as well as a generous column buffer to keep most of the frequently accessed data compressed in memory. Systems with a large amount of memory and fast spinning disks typically deliver the most cost-effective solutions.

For more information on system sizing, see the Vector Deployment Guide.