Hi,

we want to use baan on informix , hp-ux with 200 users,
what is the server requirements for such a installation.
is there any calculation method or any software to calculate the Server capasity .(cpu , ram , disk ...)

thanks

Caner

Baan or your Baan partner can advise you on this. They have a calculation sheet and/or software to advise you.

Regards,
Han

thank you very much Han ,
where can I get such a sheet or software . I don't want to ask our local partner for this . If anyone has something to calculate the server capasity please send an e-mail to me .

Thanks

Caner

You can find the Sizing Guide on the web or request them at sizing@baan.com, but my experience is that these numbers do not match real life experience at all. The guide I once got was very much outdated: based upon "ancient" hardware, also based upon experiences from Baan dated from the first experience with a certain release on a not-life system.

When you need to have more realistic fact material, you'd better "look around and ask" or consult a consulting party that does the looking and asking for you.

My guess would be: oversizing always pays off (especially when it is not your own money:)).

Sizing guides are machine specific these days. If your box is not listed though, don't even bother comparing it to something similar. There's no point.

In my experience, the sizing guides do work, but you need to be extremely accurate with your numbers. Any guesswork will result in unusable results.
On top of that, there are some factors that require a 'gut feeling', like what sessions will be used by how many users in what frequency, bla bla bla. This is where oversizing comes in. IMO you may as well consider 90% of your users to be 'heavy' users. If they're not now, they will be in the future.

If you do not have experience with multiple Baan environments, you are definitely better off hiring a specialist to do this for you. An undersized system will cost you more in the end than that (small) investment.

Caner,
If you are running Unix as you mention, run system actvity reporter (sar utility) f.e. sar 2 5 and look at you idle parameter. If it always seems to be near 0 especially while heavy network traffic maybe it is worth thinking about additonal RAM , maybe disks (another sar -d parameter) and so on. Consult your network admin also. The net devices may have different capacities and simply may not carry out the heavy traffic. There could be variuos solutions - but you know - the better server you have the less problems you encounter.

If you don't want to ask your Baan Partner then ask your system supplier. They normally can advise as well.

It all depends so much on which modules you want to use, if you use GUI or not. It's not so easy to give a solid answer to your question.

Regards,
Han

When I bought my first computer back in 1987, the first question they asked me was: What do you want to do with it?

I had no clue at all, never used computers.

They sold me a Nec V20 on 4.77 MHz. After less than a year, the hard disk of 20 Mb appeared to be full, the 360 Kb diskettes could no read the 720 Kb diskettes I got at the university, the 640 Kb memory was filled with a number of TSR programs so less than 512 Kb base memory remained free.

And every computer I bought and/or got later, showed the same kind of problems sooner or later.

Lessons to be learned: When you buy a computer, buy big overzised, because you cannot tell what you will need in the future.

Hi all,

sizing can be a very painful experience! We (only 60 users) changed the hardware twice(!) within two years until we got a proper equipment. All sizing sheets or calculating schemes completly failed. As OmeLuuk says: it's nearly unperdictable how who'll use your system and how it will react on the way how you use it. It might even happen that the big hardware hammer doesn't help. So in our case: we have to archive certain tables after a few months to keep the performance acceptable for the users.
Now after several years of experience we found a single company with a similar way how to use Baan and the size of certain tables (tfgld, tdinv, tdsls...) and we got nearly the same hardware but with a huge difference in the number of users.

Good luck!

Martin

Martin,

We have 65 users.If it is not a secret - how many records/size do you have in tfgld410 and tfgld418?
These are the most tremendous table and it is just a problem to operate with them. I'd like to compare with ours. :)

Hi Old Vens,
it's not a secret: tfgld410 - 5,7 million records; tfgld418 - 9,5 million records. Please note: we do not really need all these records because financial data are processed in another system. Once the records are transferred to the finacial system we try to delete (with standard Baan sessions) as much as possible.
Hope that helps.

Martin

Hi Martin,

We have even more - correspondingly 6 and 12 mln. records. We often perform archiving but using financial integration make the number of records enormous. Once we needed to teorganize tfgld418 - it took for about 10 hours. M-m-m-m......

Sizing is an art combined with science and a lot of experience

I f you are with HP they have an excellent man in Germany who provided the service for us.

He was quick , gave us a report before he left our site ( not days/weeks ) later , and was very helpful in our understanding and education

His advice also has proved accurate

The cost was also half the highest quote we received and we knew "other quotes" were by ambitious amateurs !

We also have an "unusual" site as we run 7 informix instances



Best of luck

Hi Frank,

we shared the same experience with HP as you did.