We are about to get a new server for RE. We have a terrific IT person in whom I have every confidence but I was wondering what experiences other users have had in setting up a new server and what suggestions/recommendations you would have to offer. Thank you in advance for any and all responses. Carl Stewart Database Administrator The Council of Canadians

I built a new server last year: 2 - Dual Core Xeon's, 4 Gig Ram, 15k SCSI drives, RAID 1 for OS and Logs, RAID 5 for DB on a split backplane, dual 1 Gig NIC's, super fast by all means. We saw no increase in speed versus our older server even though the specs are outrageously better looking. I wouldn't go too overboard on the server. We have a 7 Gig DB, so i thought more power would equal more speed but it turns out the old server was enough. By the way, it was 2 slower Xeon's, 2 Gig Ram, single RAID 1 array for all files, 1 NIC. Ended up processing just as fast. It may depend on your environment, but I would spend a little more on the workstations and a little less on server. 4 Gig of RAM is well worth the money though. Not sure I saw any improvement with dual core procs. You could always add another if need be though. Hope this helps some. [i]--- Edited at 3/29/2007 8:45:37 AM by Steve Hendey[/i]

Hi Carl, I think the Raiser's Edge install is pretty straight forward, and I've never had any problems with it. I would just follow along with the installation pdf they provide. The only thing I would suggest is to segment the server's hard drive into multiple partitions. So, you have your OS on the C: drive, and then, have your RE program files on D: (or the next letter), and, finally (if you want to go even further) put your RE database files on E:. It isn't a huge deal, (my RE program files are on C: along w/ the Windows OS, and my database files are on E:), but it helps in case you have a lot more plug-ins, etc you start adding to RE. Then you don't have to worry about running out of room, and all the other benefits that come with partitioning your drive. If you implement BBNC later on down the road, it puts more files in the RE program files area too, so it takes up a little more space at that time as well. Like I said, not a whole lot of space (my whole Blackbaud folder which includes RE, Management Console, and RE WebService for BBNC is only 1 GB), but still worth mentioning. Also, just saw the post by Steve. Our machine specs are: 2 Xeon 3.16 GHz processors, 8 GB of RAM. And I agree with Steve in that, your workstations are going to feel the strain more than your server. Before we went live with RE, I was noticing most of our users' PCs had 256 MB of RAM, some had 512 MB. So, we went through a process of getting everyone up to 1 GB of RAM. Hope that helps, George

I'm thinking of updating our workstations to 1GB. Did it make a big difference to upgrade? We currently have 512 and sometimes when I'm putting in invoices, I have to sit and wait for a page to come up.

In my experience the server can be fairly standard. 2.4ghz Xeon with 2Gb ram has been up fine for years for us. My personal preference is a RAID1 for the OS and RAID5 for data. I recently tested the same DB on 2 x Dual Core Xeon + 16gb ram and really I saw no improvements. When I ran a few of the longer reports it only seemed to fully utilise one core. Adding ram to the workstations made staff happier then uphgrading the server. Of course, number of clients, db size and usage all affect performance, so ymmv. [i]--- Edited at 3/29/2007 6:38:47 PM by Matthew Joyce[/i]

Yes, the best thing you can do for the users is get their systems up to at least 1GB of RAM. Not only will it help the Raiser's Edge on their machines, but it will also help all their other work, obviously. Chances are, RE is already competing with other things they have open (browser, email, etc).

All the advice here seems good, so I'll just add one thing. Performance in EE7 especially, but also RE7, got hammered when we moved to SQL 2005 on a RAID5 setup. We have not totally isolated RAID5 as the problem, but all our testing has pointed to this as a likely culprit. Matthew may have escaped this problem by using "a RAID1 for the OS and RAID5 for data." Ours were both RAID5. We recently bought a brand new server to combat the massive slowness we were seeing in our databases - dual dual-core Xeons, the works. Used RAID1 on Win 2003 Server sp1. Slowness went away. FYI, we also tested BB's EE 7.7 beta on a server that was experiencing significant slowness. 7.7 solved the problem - in fact, that server (at least 4 years old) ran significantly faster in many areas than our brand new one running 7.6. Hope this helps. -Sean Dagony-Clark Riverdale Country School Bronx, NY [i]--- Edited at 4/17/2007 3:12:53 PM by Sean Dagony-Clark[/i] [i]--- Edited at 4/17/2007 3:12:58 PM by Sean Dagony-Clark[/i]

After a recent conversion to The Financial Edge, users complain about the slow response of this newest product. We use RAID5 on a Windows 2003 server. Our OS is on C and the app is on E. All workstations had been upgraded to 1 Gb. Still, response time really took a hit. Kim Gajewski Wisconsin Lutheran High School [Email Removed]

Kim, this sounds very much like what we went through with EE7 with a very similar setup. As painful as it would be, a rebuild of your server using RAID1 might fix the problem. Blackbaud has not yet confirmed this as a solution. However, we tested this on four different servers. Two of them had RAID5 and ran equally slow. One older server had RAID1 and ran faster. We rebuilt it (intending to speed it up) to RAID5 and it immediately exhibited the problems the other two had. Then we bought a brand new server and kept it at RAID1, and the slowness did not occur. I can't guarantee this would fix the problem for you, but it might be worth an afternoon's work. -Sean Dagony-Clark Riverdale Country School Bronx, NY

Sounds like for all of these situations, RAID5 is the culprit. I asked our networking head here and he confirmed this is a problem for many applications. He said Microsoft Exchange Server is a good example of another application that suffers greatly in a RAID5 configuration, and therefore is set up with its own special RAID configuration (RAID 1+0 or something like that). The first paragraph of this TechTarget article (http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/expert/KnowledgebaseAnswer/0,289625,sid5_gci1100907,00.html)  sums it up nicely: "I don't recommend using RAID-5 for any sort of write-intensive work at all. RAID-5 performance is notoriously slow for writes, especially small writes, because of the CPU overhead that each write requires. The overhead is worse if the RAID-5 is software-based. Hardware-based RAID-5 is better, but still not as fast as RAID-1. Of course, RAID-1 requires a great deal of extra disk space (double the usable space you need), so you pay for each approach in different ways."

I had complained to BB about people seeing slowness in response time from AFN to FE when we upgraded back in Feb. A suggestion that they gave me was solution BB8626. It has things to try out on workstations and also steps for the server. I did perform the steps on our A/P person's computer and now her computer looks a little different because of the windows setting but she is much happier with the response times. Others may want to check out this solution also.

Can you identify the particular step(s) in the solution that made the most positive change? Or was it the overall clean up and optimization? Our workstations exceed specs and are set up with automatic maintenance. The database indexes are also automatically managed. Haven't checked the server connections yet, but when on AFN, the speed was there...only after the conversion did the slowness begin. Kim Gajewski Wisconsin Lutheran High School [Email Removed]

Kim it was not really the clean up because we had gotten new workstations. It was windows optimization settings and then I also informed them to try not having things like AIM, Outlook and music playing all day long to see if things would speed up.

I have noticed an increase in performance with workstations that have 1GB of RAM. I originally posted something about the sluggishness a while back, after upgrading to a dual 3.8GHZ server with 2GB of RAM, SQL 2005. It seems that each version performs worse than the last. I am actually going to have access to a new server and I am going to test different RAID configurations with SQL and RE/FE. Just an FYI, ,my other SQL applications run fine on this box. But if RAID 1 is the way to go..maybe that will have to be the solution.

How are people doing this RAID configuration... Using like one disk for the OS and then hardware mirroring the rest of them? Are you doing this all on one RAID controller, or are any of you putting the OS on one controller and the DATA drives on another? [i]--- Edited at 4/30/2007 3:59:24 PM by Jason Lehrhoff[/i]