Frequently Asked Questions - TeleForm Server Specification

The recommended system specification for a TeleForm Workgroup Server is stated as:

• Dual P4 3GHz CPU
• 2GB RAM
• 2003 Server
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or MSDE
• 1.5GB free hard drive space
• 100 Mb/s network card
• CD-ROM

This article will describe the key hardware recommendations for your server hardware to help you make the most of your TeleForm data capture system and minimise the possibility of problems in the future.

Understanding The Server's Function

The TeleForm server acts purely as a store for the files and data of your system. No OCR or image processing is performed on the server itself. Older versions of TeleForm allowed the Reader or Designer etc to run on the server, although this was never a supported configuration. Since TeleForm V9 it is not just unsupported but it is also impossible to achieve.

The only TeleForm modules that will run on the server are the TeleForm Monitor and License Service, neither of which require much RAM or processor time. This means that the most important specifications of a TeleForm server are the ones that support the SQL database and file system, these are usually memory and hard drive speed.

Memory

A clean install of Windows Server will typically use less than the first 1GB of RAM for normal operation. This means that whatever is left will be used by SQL Server. On a clean server a total of 2GB (1GB for Windows and 1GB for SQL) should be OK but if other applications are running such as Exchange or on-line de-fragmentation tools it is important to have more memory.

Bear in mind that it is possible to have more than one "instance" of SQL running on a server and each will require its own memory, although multiple databases on one "instance" will share memory. Some applications such as the McAfee ePolicy Orchestrator virus scanner management tool or Symantec Backup Exec may install their own instance of SQL Express, to store information and statistics, which will require its own memory in addition to the TeleForm instance!

SQL Server will automatically use all available memory, so if you have 2GB of RAM in your server and SQL is using up all available memory it doesn't necessarily mean that expanding your memory will result in a performance increase.

Hard Drives

Although the requirements suggest up to 1.5GB of hard drive space is required, even a full Enterprise installation takes less than 512MB. The additional space is required though, for storing the scanned images.

An A4 image scanned at 200dpi in black and white will take up approximately 40KB, depending on the amount of detail. This means that if you are scanning two thousand four page forms per day and have your automatic purge set to a month you could have approximately 7GB of images on your system at any one time.

40KB × 4 pages × 2000 per day × 5 days per week × 52 weeks a year ÷ 12 months per year = 6933333KB or 6.6GB

It is worth rounding the 6.6GB up to 7GB to account for indexing and tracking data and disk cluster size wastage etc.

As storage is cheap and it is rare to see a hard drive smaller than about 120GB now, the space is rarely the issue but this doesn't mean the hard drives should not be given careful consideration. As hard drives are the only part of a server with physically moving parts they are the slowest and often the bottle neck to performance. It is essential to have some form of fault tolerance on your servers hard drive configuration. For more information please see our Server Storage FAQ.

As the hard drive will be one of the main limiting factors on your servers performance it is well worth considering the latest SAS SCSI drives or at the very least some fast striped (RAID 0) SATA drives.

Processor

Although none of the TeleForm modules are compiled for 64bit or dual processor support, the operating system and SQL server can of course take advantage of both of these, if you have the right versions. The speed of the processor will also have an effect on performance but unless you are planning on processing in excess of 10,000 forms per day and assuming the server is dedicated to TeleForm any modern processor will be suitable.

Windows

Windows 2000 or 2003 Server is required. Any edition including Standard or Advanced will work OK. We recommend making sure all the latest updates are installed from the Windows Update web site.

Although not a certified configuration we have successfully installed V9 Workgroup on to Windows NT4 servers as long as an existing SQL server is also available, V10 or above hasn't been tested in this way though.

SQL Server

TeleForm Workgroup will run with any version of SQL Server 2000 or above, including the free MSDE or Express versions. TeleForm Enterprise requires the full SQL Server 2000 so will not work with the free MSDE version.

 If you would like any further information on this please contact us.

Glossary