Hi Jen,

The first thing you should look at is the hardware sizing guide that can
be found on behind blackboard. This will give you a clear indication of
what hardware specs your would look to purchase in relation to your
organisation. If you have problems finding it, just let me know as I
have a copy locally.

As for storage requirements, this is very difficult to judge. We at
Glamorgan have had Blackboard for around 5 years and are now close to
200GB worth of data, but we do not cap courses, nor do we restrict what
information they can put into the system. We are however moving down a
similar line to yourself to look at streaming media rather than large
file uploads into Blackboard.

The best solution and to ensure a robust future proof solution, I would
say, that you need to build in some kind of redundancy. Typically most
large organisations use a load balancing solution, but what you have to
remember is that a hardware/software load balanacer is still a single
point of failure, so you need to look at redundancy for this also.

If you want to know more or have further questions please just email me
off list.

Kind Regards,
Chris Orridge 
Systems Support Officer 
Systems Development and Support 
eST, LCSS
University of Glamorgan 
+44 (0) 1443 48 2411 
[log in to unmask] 
http://celt.glam.ac.uk

-----Original Message-----
From: Blackboard/Courseinfo userslist
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jen Fuller
Sent: 15 November 2007 15:24
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Blackboard server expansion

Dear all,

We have been using Blackboard for over two years at the College and 
happily uptake has increased significantly over this period.
Unfortunately 
our single server installation is now runing out of space and we are 
looking to expand to meet future demands.

As many of you will have worked through this stage in your own
Blackboard 
systems developments I wondered if you could advise on:

- what capacity server to purchase - is there a sizing model to follow?
- what was your predicted / actual expansion rate?
- do you have any resilience such as clustering or failover

A lot of our storage space is being used up by lecturers uploading large

files. We had thought about capping courses space and purchasing an 
additional streaming server for those who required it (media subjects, 
etc). Has anyone capped their course sizes and what space did you
allocate?

We are using Bb Basic Licence v7.1.391.0 with MSQL database and apps.
Any 
advice you can give (on list or off) would be much appreciated.

Kind regards,

Jen Fuller
Blackboard System Administrator