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Small & Simple Server

OK, I hope to eventually contribute to the art of high-performance SQL, but for now my needs (and experience) are much simpler. I’m looking to deploy a box for OLTP. This will service ~ 30 desktops, and ~ 100 online users. Budget pretty much limits me to a single box (i.e. no external storage). I will ship logs to a backup server. I can see 50% user growth in the next 1-2 years, but also expect to be able to replace the hardware by the end of that time. DB size is only ~ 20GB overall, and could easily be 60GB in the next two years. The data tables that I need fastest access to are few, small, and narrow (2 to 3 tables at < 10MB each), so I expect to pin them in RAM. With that in mind, anyone see any big problems with this, considering the constraints? – DL380 G5 1×5160 CPU (dual-core/3GHz – the quad/2.0 is ~ same $, but I’m thinking the GHz will help us more than 2 more cores).
– Win 2003 x64 with SQL 2005 x64
– 4x1GB RAM
– Included P400/256 SAS array controller with:
– 2 x 36GB RAID-1 OS drives (10K probably OK, since I expect these will be mostly idle)
– 2 x 36GB 15K RAID-1 for tempdb
– 4 x 146GB 10K RAID-10 for data and logs.
That fills the available HDD slots. My thoughts:
If I can swing it, I’ll drop in another 4GB (for 8 total). That would seem to be the best incremental improvement.
The disk subsystem concerns me, but I’m really not hitting it that hard. This is for a call center, though, so latency will be noticed. Would I be better off with a 6-disk RAID-10 for data, tempdb, and logs?
I’m expecting that code performance will be more an issue than these hardware alternatives, but I’d appreciate any feedback. – Gary

As you have mentioned, code performance will probably be more of a performance problem than your hardware. Given the information you have provided, your choices appear to be fine to me. And as you said, if you have a few extra dollars, invest them in RAM. —————————–
Brad M. McGehee, SQL Server MVP
Many thanks for the quick reply, Brad! Got to put the order together by tomorrow. Heh, I think I got pulled over near Rogersville once…
i suggest the ML370G5 over the DL380G5
it supports much more internal hard drives
get as many of the 36G 15K or 72G 10K as you can
go with 8GB ram if you can (4x2G)
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