Patent ID: 7747449

Claim:
A method of providing a cost estimate for a data processing system, the method comprising: selecting, by a central processing unit, application programs, from a set of application programs, each application program having objects; entering, by a central processing unit, load profile data for the selected application programs, wherein the load profile data comprises a total number of orders to be processed per year by means of the selected application programs on the data processing system, an average number of items per order, an average number of concurrent users, and an average retention time of an object before archiving; retrieving, from a database, sets of sizing coefficients for the objects of the selected application programs, the number of retrieved sets of sizing coefficients for the objects of the selected application program corresponding to the number of selected application programs, and the retrieved sets of sizing coefficients being unique and assigned to a particular selected application program among the selected application programs; estimating, by the central processing unit, hardware requirements for the data processing system for the objects of the selected application programs by entering the sizing coefficients and the load profile data into a sizing model; entering the hardware requirements for the objects of the selected application programs into a cost estimation component to generate cost estimates for the objects of the selected application programs; calculating, by the general processing unit, the total hardware requirement by adding the hardware requirements for the objects of the selected application programs; calculating, by the central processing unit, a total cost estimate for the data processing system by adding the cost estimates for the objects of the selected application programs; and outputting the total cost estimate.