Hi,

I am working for a small company where we use a 20-user Baan environment on an old Sun system. The hardware will reach its 6th birthday this year and we really would like to replace this rapidly aging hardware with a new system. However we are struggling to convince the management of the necessity of the replacement as they tend to believe that whatever worked well for 6yrs will keep working well for another couple of years. So what I am looking for is any ideas, tips, links to useful sites or stories from other users in similar situations. Objective (and subjective) information that we could use to convince our management that we are getting closer to a (HW) disaster every day. I would really appreciate any feedback :)

Greetings,

Roy.

With 20 users you could go linux or windows fairly easily.
that would seriously cut down on your hardware support fees and
should pretty much pay for itself right there..

Dave

Hi Dave,

We have been considering both linux, windows and solaris platforms. Price is indeed an important factor in the decision making process but not the main one in our case. What we are fighting is more the indifference towards specific IT issues such HW lifetimes etc :(

You should be able to use tbase (Baans own database) on Linux - use SUSE Enterprise Linux 8. Unless you have them already, it will save you purchasing licenses of SQL Server.

I think you need to be able to put a case to management in terms of dollars and cents. If there isn't a ROI then management would be delinguent in spending money. The fact that the gear is six years old does not of its self mean it is no good (what do you not like about it).

Some obvious ideas: Is the present equipment under maintenance (if not you need new gear urgently). If so you may find maintenance for a new box of the same spec would be much lower. Simialrly if you need to increase dasd you will probably find new disks much cheaper and bigger etc. Is present performance satisfactory -- new gear would be better performance.

Hi Roy,

I think sometimes there is an 'educational' aspect involved as well, not just dollars and cents as Terry mentioned. Good luck with the project though.

Hi

We had a 5yr old Sun installation (E3500 Application server & E450 Database server) which we replaced with a pair of windows boxes (HP DL740s). We are supporting 170 users on the machine with increased performance (hours to minutes for some reports).

We justified the change soley on the savings in maintenance cost and achieved payback in 15 months.

Andy

We're just a few weeks away from turning off our E3500 for a newer Sun server. This has occured as part of a migration from 4c3 to 4c4ags0.

Maybe you could use the increased functionality of a later Baan release as part of your argument. This of course depends upon what version of Baan you are running now.

We also justified the purchase of a new server based upon at what point we would need to buy some more disk storage.

Good luck with it.

Cheers
Neal