Blackberry 4.x Design 101

So, when our corporate parent was given the go ahead to deploy our new E2K3 mail system, our business unit (ok me) insisted they deply Blackberry 4.0 (at the time, 4.1 is out now).

We had several discussions on why we wanted 4.0 (funny that I’d have to explain 4.0 reasons to a company with over 15k devices, but oh well). One of the discussions went something like this:

Business IT: So, when you deploy BES 4.0 we want it hosted on SQL server, not MSDE.

Corporate IT: No, that’s not how we do it.

Business IT: Why?

Corporate IT: Because we’re not an SQL shop, we just do email.

Business IT: I run email now for the busines, AND I can deploy BES to SQL, what’s so hard about that?

Corporate IT: That’s not how we deploy BES, and we are in charge of the new BES Servers, so we will deploy them on MSDE.

I knew why I wanted the to deploy with SQL: non-impacting BES moves for users, wireless provisioning, etc.

Turns out though, there is a major performance limitation that Blackberry has built into the 4.x server if you run on MSDE only. Since 4.x is so dependent on the SQL portion of the server now, they limit how much load they’ll put onto the MSDE database, and consequently your overall performance and capacity suffer. I quote from the blackberry performance guide for 4.0 “If you are enabling more than 500 BlackBerry users, you should use Microsoft SQL Server 2000.“

So now, corporate has deployed 4 BES 4.0 servers with MSDE, and we have the following issues:

1. No ability to move users between servers, i.e. NYC to Los Angeles. Movement of a user from one server to the other requires a whole wipe and resync
2. Performance issues. We consistently see 2-3 thread hangs a day with our current setup, whereas the SQL version in 3.6 didn’t have anywhere near that many
3. No option for wireless provisioning. Since they have 4 seperate databases, provisioning wirelessly is close to impossible.

With a little research and a call to Blackberry’s technical experts, our corporate IT guys would have known that SQL was the way to go, and we would be enjoying a much better 4.0 experience.