New Server Equipment

[SCOLETTI]

Michael,

This is Jim Clark the IT consultant for Sherry.
We will be replacing their server shortly (before New Year's I hope). To do that we need to get it on order pretty darn soon.
I want to make sure they get the same if not better performance from A1-Law so I am hoping you can provide some input on the following.

SBS 2008 is 64bit - will A1 run in that environment?
How much RAM will it take advantage of? I'm planning on 12 -16GB any reason to use more?
It appears A1 is disk intensive so I would tend to continue to use 10K scsi drives in the new machine (like their current one.)
They have 15 workstations.
I'm planning Raid1 for the OS and Raid 5 (3 drives) for the data and A1 area. Any reason to consider Raid 10 for the data area?
Is A1 considered a background application or does it run in the foreground?


Lastly - do you have a knowledgebase or article that spells out the process of re-installing A1 and moving the data over to a new computer?

[Admin1]

A1-Law will not be nearly as disk intensive if they are running A1Comm. It should be fine in the environment but I do know some setups with Win 2008 server may give problems but we are not sure yet if that is due to incorrectly configured antivirus software or something else. But, in the few situations where that has been a problem we know it can be corrected with a NAS drive or properly configuring everything. For example, we know of one office that was using a "mirror image backup" and when the mirror image was copying the files it would lock them which would then cause errors. They simply had to change the time of the backup or change the backup system and then the errors went away.

All you should need to do is copy the entire A1-Law folder and properly share the folder and it should work just fine.

Mike

[SCOLETTI]

So Mike - just to be clear on 'not so disk intensive' - They ARE running A1-Comm.
This is a significant decision because there is basically a $1000 cost difference between the 7.2k drives and the 10k drives for the 3 of them.
I was hoping for an answer that looked like this:
Definitely stay with the 10k drives for maximum performance ---- or 10k drives are overkill you will be very happy with 7.2k drives

I think we would prefer a 'properly configured everything'. Is this something we could contract with you to remote in and give it a once over, once we have moved it?

[Admin1]

I think the disk intensity should not even be close to the maximum throughput of the drives. In fact, I don't think the maximum bandwidth for most networks even come close to the hard drive throughput since most go at 100 mbs or 1 gps. It's really up to you but 7200 or 10K rpm is not going to make that much difference unless there are other apps that are causing it to be disk intensive.

Mike