Nav Performance & Infrastructure

Business Central/NAV Technical Forum
1

Hi all,

I work for a company that designs, manufactures, markets and retails its products (direct to consumer and via other channels).

We have chosen Navision to replace over 5 ageing disparate systems and are in the design phase of the project.

One part of this process is to specify the hardware/software infrastructure to support the system in line with performance and availability expectations.

We will shortly receive proposals for the Navision servers (hardware & software including OS and SQL 2005) from two potential infrastructure suppliers.

I’m keen to undertake as much research as possible to assist in the supplier selection process. Any tips, advice or links regarding Navision performance and what areas the suppliers should be focusing on will be greatly appreciated.

Aside from the performance requirements of the system high availability is also key. I would like to remove the Navision SQL servers and associated storage as a single point of failure through the use of clustering, SQL mirroring or other similar technology and any comments or experiences in this area would be appreciated.

Our Navision system will be used by the whole business and be interfaced with the following systems;

  • Preactor for production scheduling/resource planning purposes
  • Microsoft RMS - current Epos system
  • Microsoft BizTalk - Current B2C website

We will have 140 concurrent users from go live with 15% increase per annum (all will be on one site)

80% of the users are order entry operators entering on average a total of 6000 orders per day (average of 1.4 items per order) with the same number of warehouse shipments

We will be performing marketing database segmentation creation and management within Navision

Over 2,000000 customer records and 1,000000 contacts will be imported into Navision prior to go live

I can provide further detailed information if required.

Regards

Adam

2

Hey Adam,

your best bet, is to get in a Freelancer to evaluate your situation BEFORE you sign anything with an NSC. I have written a bit on this topic that you can find here:

http://wiki.dynamicsbook.com/index.php?title=Sales_process

http://wiki.dynamicsbook.com/index.php?title=Finding_the_right_VAR

http://wiki.dynamicsbook.com/index.php?title=Pre_Sales_Analysis

In reality, choice of the right partner is probably the most important step to a successful implementation. And I don’t mean that you might find a bad partner, but that you may find a partner that is not matched to your needs.

David.

3

I don’t know exactly your database, but you probably will grow about 30G per year (just guessing). With good hardware and correct Navision tuning you can have a smooth system.

I think you biggest problem will be locking in sales order. If you have 112 users inserting and registering sales order you can have some problems. You could use night batch posting.

4

Oh and one more thing. Please DO NOT buy a NAV server at this point. I know that the Vendor will tell you that they know what you need, but in reality, until your NAV system is designed, you really can not be sure of what is needed. And these days, it can cost a lot when you need to change boxes, get a different drive configuration etc. Of course most of the infrastructure you need to get in place, and that can be resolved, but leave the SQL server until your NAV partner or your NAV SQL tuner specs it out for you, that will save you a lot of money, and a lot of headaches.

5

Just one more question, what Navision version is you planning to implement?