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New SQL Server

I work for a small company as a Web Developer and we’re buying a dedicated SQL Server 2005 box for the sites we host and I don’t know how to spec one of these. Budget is not really an issue. We have 12 databases on our current SQL Server 2000 machine the largest of which is approximately 1GB. Read access/speed is the most critical part as there are very few insert or update transactions. We see approximately 5,000-10,000 unique visitors on our site a day. Thanks.
Below is a Dell example config: PowerEdge 2850
2 x Dual Core Intel® Xeon™ Processor, 2x2MB Cache, 2.8GHz, 800MHz FSB
12GB DDR2 400MHz (6X2GB), 4 Single and 2 Dual Ranked DIMMs
2+4 Split Backplane Daughtercard
dual channel SCSI RAID on motherboard
2 x PERC4eDC-PCI Express, 128MB Cache, 2-External Channels
4x73GB 10K RPM Ultra 320 SCSI Hard Drive
$8,300 PowerVault® 220S External SCSI Storage Array, Rack
PowerVault 22XS, Dual, U320 Enclosure Management Module
8 x 36GB 15K U320 SCSI Hard Drive
$4933 each (get 2 of these) the important points are:
1. dual-core proc because of the favorable licensing terms.
2. multiple SCSI channels (2 for internal bays, 4 to external storage)
3. lots of disks for high bandwidth and random IO rate you can pick either the 74 or 146GB 10K drives, or the 36GB or 73GB 15K drives, the prices are close enough A HP example would be the Proliant DL385, dual core Opterons
you could go with the SAS model,
ask if it supports 2 P600 SAS RAID controllers,
get 4-8 internal drives, 2 MSA 50 external storage units, with 8-10 drives each biggest mistake:
sizing storage by the size of your databases
right approach:
ignore the fact that this is much more disk capacity than you currently have DB for,
the point of the disk config is to drive 1GB/sec+ from disk
see the thread by agw on HP DL585 etc also see my article on server and storage config (in the articles section of this site)
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