Criteria for Choosing Architecture
Infrastructure Cost
- Cost of servers, clients, and circuits
- Mainframes: very expensive; terminals, PCs: very inexpensive
Development Cost
- Mainly cost of software development
- Software: expensive to develop; off-the-shelf software: inexpensive
Scalability
- Ability to increase (or decrease) in computing capacity as network demand changes
- Mainframes: not scalable; PCs: highly scalable