Hi,
We are runnig Baan IV Nascar with Oracle 7.3.4.3 in Aix 4.3(Unix) and a IBM Server RS6000 SP2. The maintenence of this enviroment is very expensive, we want to reduce our cost structure, then we are thinking to change to Intel and Windows 2000 enviroment.
We have currently 200 concurrent users.

Thanks for your recomendations.

Hi,

Have a look at this thread: Changing from Oracle/Solaris to SQL/NT (http://www.baanboard.com/baanboard/showthread.php?s=&threadid=6529)

My recommendation would be to go against your migration plan. There's no better OS than UNIX in my books.

Just out of curiosity: why is your current environment expensive to maintain? People cost, hardware maintenance?

Hardware maintenance.
We are paying 7.000 $ per month by maintenance of a Server IBM RS6000 SP2 (big server with 4 nodes). I believe that 4 servers based in Intel is more cheap.

Thank for you comment.

Roger Carrasco

Roger,

Before you jumped in the deep end I would advise you to get in touch with other Baan customers who run a similar environment to yours on an NT platform. Surely you pay more for an proprietary IBM solution but also think of all the extra's you gained that may or may not be available or work as well on an NT environment. 2 items as food for thought:
1) If you are running Baan a multi-node SP then I assume you are using a clustered setup. Can you get the same reliability on a NT platform? I think not.
2) Administration: do you have the necessary expertise to properly administer a Windows NT environment? Can you migrate all site specifics from UNIX to NT? (e.g. automated tasks etc)

Patrick,

Currently we are looking for other Baan customer who run this enviroment (Oracle/NT) but haven't found any yet.

We are not using Cluster with the SP. Two nodes run the Application, anothe node is for development and the last node is for the Database.

We have an expert Unix Administrator and another expert on Windows Administration, I think we will not have major issues with the Unnatended tasks.

Regards,

Roger

There are enough Baan customers working on NT/Oracle (one of my customers actually does) but not with that many users. The only Baan site with that large number of users that I know of is VW. The latest that I heard of them (a few weeks back) is that they are planning to migrate to W2K.

They still have problems with the OS in such a way that they reboot on a regular basis.
My own customer has less users and that environment is stable. We heardly reboot however the Baan environment and the DB are brought down every night for a off-line backup.

As an administrator I have to say that I prefer Unix as well. (In fact I am typing this from my Linux box at home ;-) )

Regards,
Han

Roger,

Han raises a very valuable point. One that I didn't raise myself before because I am not that familiar with nowadays Intel specifications and sizing guides. The point is that you will have to make sure that you do an adequate sizing for your Intel hardware. Traditionally Wintel architecture does not scale as well as most UNIX hardware.

Oh and I am also typing this from one of my Linux boxes :)

If I'm not mistaken, Baan has a version for Linux, but Im not sure if it is for IV and /or V. I know Oracle does because I have an Oracle8i DB running on a Intel/Linux server.

Baan on Linux has been a much discussed topic - see several threads on this board. I don't think there's any production release for Linux yet though I hope it will come soon. However, there are arguments that go against Linux (and Windows) for that matter on Intel platforms. One of the reason companies do decide for the more expensive, single-vendor solutions are for reasons of support, stability and reliability. If you are running your Baan application on an IBM (or HP, SUN etc) you can be sure that when you do run into trouble you will get what you pay for. You have a single point of contact for your hardware and OS problems. In many cases the hardware offers possibilities of online repair (e.g. hot-swappable CPU's) that will prevent you from loosing precious uptime. Some of these features are years away from being available on the Intel platform, if they will be made available at all.

At the end of the day you got to put your benefits against your costs and see which ones outweighs the other one.

Sorry, I just realized that the URL in one of the previous posts was not 100% correct. I have fixed this now.

Hi,

We've just migrated to win2k/oracle 8.0.5 with 88 users.
It is not a simple migration though...
The first thing you might encounter is the windows heap size problem when you reached a certain number of users login. A tweak is required to resolve (refer to Baan sol 74316, more).
The following things for u to note:-
1) You may require to setup a print server
2) Check you current port set. The NT portset may give you different set of issues.
3) You may want to use windows advance server ( I heard it handles heap size better than windows server).
4) You needs lots of memory 8GB or more
5) Advice you to purchase servers which support U320 for superb I/O
6) Oracle 7.3.4.x is not supported on win2k.


PS:I'm still a unix person at heart but if you can handle microsoft software it should be ok.

In case we decide migrate to Windows 2000. Which size of server Intel you recommend for a Baan with 200 concurrent users?. Memory, Procesors by Servers of Applications and Database.

I appreciate your help.

Best Regards

Roger Carrasco
Dana Venezuela

Hi,

For 88 users we're using a HP proliant 4-way(2 X P4 2Ghz Xeon with 2MB cache, 4GB, 12 X 36GB UW3 HDDs). You may want to refer to the url below for more details.

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/platforms/index-dl-ml.html

Depending on your budget there is also a 8-way DL760.

Hope this helps.

Hi Zaid,

It is perfect !!!
I only want to know like you feel the performance this server HP+W2K+Oracle and your 88 users ?. Will it be help if i buy 2 servers manage cluster or to use one server with the Baan application and another with Oracle?.

Which is your experience with this.

Thanks for you help
Best Regard

Hi,

We've enjoyed a average of 40% performance (not bad for a S$50K server upgrade budget), increase in MPS/MRP, month-end processing, etc.
We have done baan archiving for only one FY and planning more of this exercise and to complete the process, tuning of some large table tuning. This would inject more performance increase. Our datafiles/usage is about 100/70GB and growth is about 1.2GB per year. The biggest table as you know is the gld106. Our archiving is an on-going process and this in the long run would help improve performance in other finance related processes.


PS: Intel based servers technology is fast increasing, U160/U320 scsi disks would eventually give way for serial disks(supports more than 320MB - 1GB disk transfer rate). This would be in the next few years. By that time the Itanium based servers would be a norm. Price per performance would be vital.


Hope this helps,