# ANOM fits on 24 floppy disks

> Compressed, the whole ANOM back-office weighs 33 MiB, updates included. That is 24 floppy disks, or less than three high-resolution photos. Here is why it matters for your servers, and where it goes next.

Published: 2 October 2026
Source: https://alephfront.com/blog/anom-fits-on-floppy-disks/


Business software tends to be heavy. Large installers, long deployments, and a back-office that needs a small fleet of servers before it shows its first order.

ANOM, the back-office we built to drive Intershop, is the opposite. Its first version weighed **17 MiB** compressed. Since then it has taken on major features: EDI exchanges with our customers' purchasing systems, PunchOut catalogues opened from their procurement tools, its own search engine, negotiated price lists for each customer, promotions, approval workflows by cost centre, GDPR requests handled from the back-office.

All of that roughly doubled its size, and no more. Compressed for delivery, the whole release now weighs **33 MiB**: everything it needs to run, nothing left to download. Unpacked on the server, **62 MiB**.

{{< anom-weight >}}

## 24 floppy disks

A 3.5-inch floppy disk holds 1.44 MB. Compressed, ANOM fits on **24 of them**. Anyone who installed software in the 1990s will remember feeding disks into a drive for an afternoon. Twenty-four would have been a long afternoon, but a single box.

Today's comparison is less nostalgic. The three high-resolution photos above weigh **37 MiB** together, more than the whole platform. A single 48-megapixel ProRAW photo from a recent iPhone, about 75 MB according to Apple, weighs more than twice as much as ANOM.

Updates are just as light. Every update, fixes included, ships the whole release, the same 33 MiB, installed in one piece. Nothing to patch file by file.

## A small server is enough

A light program is also a frugal one. In our pre-production environment, with its catalogue loaded and everyday traffic, an ANOM instance uses **391 MiB** of memory for a small catalogue and about **1.3 GiB** for the largest, and well under **1%** of one processor core.

Those figures fit within an entry-level virtual private server, the kind any hosting provider rents by the month. No cluster, no farm of dedicated machines. That means a smaller bill, a smaller footprint, and fewer moving parts to secure and maintain.

## Next stop: a Raspberry Pi

If ANOM fits on a small VPS, how small can it go? Our next target is the Raspberry Pi, the credit-card-sized computer.

![A Raspberry Pi in a clear case, with ANOM printed on the side of its case](/images/blog/anom-light/anom-raspberry-pi.webp)

Stay tuned.