Server/Storage Performance - Poll (of sorts)

Michael Lennon

We have a decision to make in terms of new hardware to improve performance of our Raiser's Edge database. We will be keeping the application on a virtual server moving to a new Hyper-V host and have been advised to go with a flash-based SAN. Apart from the high cost of this type of SAN I'm reading that it's not necessarily a good move to go with a SAN v local disks for performance and would like to know what runs well for other organisations - if you don't mind sharing. Are you running your Raiser's Edge in a virtual environment (Hyper-V, VMWare...?)? Are you storing your VM and/or data on a SAN or on local disks? How would you rate performance?

Dusty Huff

Michael Lennon:
We have a decision to make in terms of new hardware to improve performance of our Raiser's Edge database. We will be keeping the application on a virtual server moving to a new Hyper-V host and have been advised to go with a flash-based SAN. Apart from the high cost of this type of SAN I'm reading that it's not necessarily a good move to go with a SAN v local disks for performance and would like to know what runs well for other organisations - if you don't mind sharing. Are you running your Raiser's Edge in a virtual environment (Hyper-V, VMWare...?)? Are you storing your VM and/or data on a SAN or on local disks? How would you rate performance?

We are using 2 Dell PowerEdge 710 in a cluster with HyperV. We are using 2 Dell EqualLogic iSCSI SAN's in a storage pool. We have the following Blackbaud servers: FAWeb, Netclassroom, Netcommunity, BBMC, SQL, SQL for Netcommunity, REweb server for Netcommunity. All of these are running as virtual servers with no performance issues. We are using dual dual port 10GB NICs from server to switch. We are a private school PreK-8 grade with around 600 students and 110 faculty/staff.