Upgrading to Baan IV off Unix ????

[sarbogast]

We are currently runing 4c4 on an HP 9000 Unix platform with Oracle 7.4X database. Our company is a 100 user license site that has been on Baan since 12/1997 with very few problems. A year and a half ago we upgraded to 4c4 successfully.
We want to migrate off of the HP 9000 platform (it is showing its age and we do not want to put more $$$ into it) to a non-unix environment but do not get a clear and comforatble picture or explanation from Baan on the stability of 4c4 on NT/Win2000. This is causing us to consider upgrading to 5.X or waiting to 6. I am personnally not excited about implementing a version that is not stable or newly released and proven, Baan 6.

Any thoughts on the best non-unix platforms that companies operate on? What suggestion does anyone have regarding optimum platform and operating system for Baan; NT, etc...???

[patvdv]

Somewhere I detect a strange dilemma in your questioning. First you say that you have been running Baan for the last 5,6 years with very few problems on HP 9000 platform but yet you don't want to follow a reasonable upgrade path? Why to try to fix something that isn't broken?

[sarbogast]

Valid observation...up until now we haven't experience significant downtime or issues. Most important first rule in anything is not to fix or replace something that isn't broken. Your point taken.

Issues:
1) Support cost for HP 9000 continues to go up. Oracle 7.X is not supported.
2) Running out of disk space and management does not want to put additional money into computer. We have archived 2 years but require keeping data visible for govt. regulations and audit.
3) we have 3 sites now with connectivity issues...

Again, we are not set on this...we simple are looking at.

So I ask same question again...best course of action.

Steve.

[patvdv]

Steve,

I understand your situation. However, let's put things into perspective. Changing platform does not alter:

a. the fact that you have to upgrade your database.
b. your diskspace requirements.

Changing to an Intel base would save you money but at what cost in regards to stabilility, uptime, administration etc.

Have you tried addressing this issue to HP? Trying to refinance your current deal/hardware in the light of hardware upgrades. Have you considered second-hand stuff?

[Markus Schmitz]

Hi Steve,

most Baan clients, who are running Baan on HP now for 3-5 years are in a similar situation like you. So maybe you should look around, what other companies are doing.

Expecially recently I see the following trend:

Companies give their old HW (often several servers) back and buy new one (often consolidated onto one server). Reasons:

a) The old HW has often very high support costs, while the new one comes with cheap support for the first three years. Just last month I had a client, who was able to buy new servers with much more disk capacity and better backup technology including support for three years for the same price, than the support of his old HW for the same period!!!

b) HP did some very good progress on their HW. Nowadays you will often be ok, with a much smaller server than in the past.

c) Migration from HP-Ux10/11.0 to HP-Ux11.i is easy and not very risky. For this change you do not even need to change your portingset.

d) You can keep all your admin procedures and tools.

e) Not much (if at all) new to learn.

f) Considering the current economic situation of HP and other vendors, you get very good prices indeed.

On a personal note, I would advise you to stay with HP-Ux. I am not a unix geek and I had some good experience with WinNT. But your user number is at the limit of NT's capabilities for BaanIV.
Also I believe, that if you migrate to NT, then you also should migrate to Sql Server. Oracle was just not written for NT and you notice this, when you administrate it on NT. Two Examples here:

1) On NT even local database communication will always go via SQL Net!

2) On NT your Alertlog will grow as on Unix. But on NT you have no tools to analyze files of several MBs. So the first thing you will do, is to install something like MKS or Cygwin to get your UNix tools (grep, tail, ...) back. Same goes by the way for Baan logs of bdbpost/pre!

Regards

Markus

[bamnsour]

Hi Pat and Markus,

You guys are such good advocates for HPUX and Unix in general...

I agree with what was said. HPUX is a very stable operating system and it can run for months without having to reboot. It is a bit expensive compared to Intel based servers, but I would check the option of a trade-in.

- Bader

[patvdv]

Bader,

I think there is good reason for that. Anyway you turn it, Baan and Oracle are both products conceived on the UNIX platform. Their NT counterparts were made because of economical reasons, not technical. Hence the original UNIX variants will be always be superior IMHO. This is leaving out the intrinsic qualities of the different OS's the application runs on.

[sarbogast]

Thanks so much Bader and Marcus! I believe the option of looking into a trade-in is good advice. Additionally, so much used hardware is on the market right now, you can get a 1-2 year system but for pennies on the $$$.

The comment regarding the limit of users that is appropriate for NT is consistant to my information, thanks for concurring.

Steve.

[JamesV]

I'll throw in my two cents worth.

First of all, instead of a used system, consider an HP refurbished system. We are a hardware reseller and I can tell you that the refurb gear is an excellent value as it comes at a significant discount as well as a "as new" HP warranty and support contract.

But, we have migrated customers from UNIX to NT very successfully in the 50-150 user count. With a properly sized and architected Win2000/SQL2000 environment this is very doable if you do not have code, processes or applications that require UNIX.

I personnally prefer UNIX but I have seen a number of accounts make this choice versus the cost of compliance with Oracle's rapacious licensing policies.

Hope this help and let's keep the dialog going...

-- Jim

[estotz]

My 3 cents ...

NT/Win2000 with SQLServer should handle 100 users. A client of ours got 3 servers, (app/db and a test server to play), raid disks (> 100 Gig total) etc. for under $30,000. I'm not sure what HP equipment costs nowadays, but you can get a cadillac solution on a wintel platform nowadays for next to nothing. These servers were quad processors ... 2Gig each? Dell supplied them.

I've been consulting for a while, and have seen a great number of installations on windows that have no problems vs Unix solutions. Unix is great, but not necessary in a lot of cases.

[Frank Rogers]

HP just lowered their prices on some Unix servers by 25% !

If you wish to reduce maintence cost you can obtain alternative third party quotes and refer these to HP . They do do discounts !

[victor_cleto]

And just think on the ease of migration, by keeping both servers for the migration time and then use your existing scripts, etc.