Well, it looks like I have been given the responsibility for picking out the newest PC Database server for my company. We are a pretty big company, but all mission critical stuff is done on IBM AS/400. All of our internal stuff is on MS SQL Server. While I have programmed for and administered SQL databases for over 5 years now, I am not really familiar with what is the best hardware setup for something like this. I was looking for any pointers in terms of CPU's, amounts of memory, and the such. We order all our Servers from Compaq (and for some reason all our desktops from Dell... can't explain), so regardless of what some of you may think of Compaq, that is what I have to work with (I know there home stuff is generally poor, but their servers are actually quite nice). I have between $16K and $19K, although the company is wanting me to stay with the lower number.
Anyway, it has to be a Rack mounted, but other than that I have free rein. I have been looking at dual Xeon 900MHZ w/2MB cache. These are quite pricey, but I thought that the cache would really help. Would it be better to go with a quad of 700MHZ processors w/512k cache? Also, I was going to get about 1Gig of mem. Would it be better to go with lesser processors and more memory? The hard drives are going to be Ultra SCSI-3 10K RPM, so that shouldn't be a problem. Anyway, I just wanted to know where the balance should be between processors/cache/and main memory.
Thanks for any input.
Anyway, it has to be a Rack mounted, but other than that I have free rein. I have been looking at dual Xeon 900MHZ w/2MB cache. These are quite pricey, but I thought that the cache would really help. Would it be better to go with a quad of 700MHZ processors w/512k cache? Also, I was going to get about 1Gig of mem. Would it be better to go with lesser processors and more memory? The hard drives are going to be Ultra SCSI-3 10K RPM, so that shouldn't be a problem. Anyway, I just wanted to know where the balance should be between processors/cache/and main memory.
Thanks for any input.