[shaggydogt]

Hello All,

I hope I'm posting this to the correct forum. We're moving to Blackbaud Financial Edge this July (at the end of our fiscal year) and I'm looking into setting up the Blackbaud server as well as looking at the current config of the workstations. While I'm shopping for a server, I had a couple of questions on how others setup their database server. At another location where I do IT work, they have FE running and the performance is horrible. I'm trying to make sure the same doesn't happen with this new setup.

First off let's talk about RAID. I'm not sure which RAID configuration would be the best. I've looked around and narrowed down what I think will work without being too expensive.

Using 4 100+GB
RAID1 (2 disks) - Operating System and FE Log Files
RAID1 (2 disks) - FE database

-OR-

Using 5 100+GB
RAID1 (2 disks) - Operating System and FE Log Files
RAID5 (3 disks) - FE Database

Which one looks better or am I barking up the wrong tree entirely?

Processors
Should I get at least 4 processors and set the affinity of one to the operating system and set the other 3 to the SQL database? Or will 2 processor with no affinity set do just fine. I have about 3 users constantly working with FE.


SQL
I know FE ships with a free version of MSSQL for databases up to 4 GB but I know I can get the Standard Edition for 250.00 through Tech Soup. This might seem like overkill, but would the additional features be beneficial? Also, has anybody ran into any problems yet with using MSSQL 2005 Standard?

Sorry for the long post....thanks though for any advice.

Edward Taylor

[shaggydogt]

Hmmm....no feedback. Doesn't look like FE gets nearly as much attention as RE, I might should have posted this question elsewhere.

For anyone else interested, below is what I considered to be the best RAID configuration for our server.

Using 2 - 73 GB disks
RAID1 - Mirror
Operating System and SQL Transaction Log

Using 4 - 73 GB disks
RAID10 - Striping with Mirror
FE Database

After reading several articles it seems RAID10 provides the best performance while still offering fault tolerance. The only think I was still unsure of was how many controllers I needed and the actually hardware setup, but I'm sure I can find some more info on that.

[mjohnson]

Hi,

You probably have gotten this up and running but one thing we noticed is that FE needs a decent amount of RAM on the workstations. We use a minimum of 1Gig or RAM per workstation and that keeps the users at bay with the speed of FE. Anything less then 1Gig and we found that the workstation was unusable for more FE applications.

- Matt