New Server - Core Components?

[Goksly]

Ahoy,
I am a developer by trade but my boss looks after the server side of things but I think he has been out of the loop hardware wise for a while and might be out of his depth.... but anywho, he has been put in charge of buying a few new servers. The budget for 3 new servers (2 web and 1 database) is around £7.5k.

Now I saw a spec he got from a company and it looks as though the CPU is based on the core 2 duo (but obviously the Xeon version). I was pushing for the Xeon counter part to the i7, but he said he phoned someone from Misco and they said they aren't out yet, which I find hard to believe!

As I said - I'm not a server guru, far from it. But if we are going to get some new hardware, I want to make sure it's at least in the correct ball park. Any pointers for the core components?
Thanks.

 

[Goksly]

Thanks for the feedback guys. For the DB we've got to get a single cpu (due to licencing issues) so I want to make sure it's a good one The boss always buys from HP tbh, but don't know why he is having a hard time getting one with the CPU list I supplied (from the wiki page listed above).

Will keep proding him in the direction of some of the posts above

@iaind:
We have a single database (about 5gb in size) that contains the core system the business is build on and the accounts information (not sure of size).

There are about 5 people in accounts, but the main load will be coming from the 'core' system. We have about 150 engineers who download and upload information from the pdas (what I would class as light load) and then 50 or so people in the office running reports, which usually hammer the db the most.

At the moment (I'm not 100% sure on the hardware), I think its running the P4 HT server equivalent (~3ghz or there about) and most likely running on a single hdd.

External web server: used by all the clients to query the core system as well as the 150 engineers in the field.

Internal web server: used bu the 50 or so people in the office.

Personally I think we are all out of our depth when it comes to small business hardware. I have no doubt the configuration will be less than perfect, but I just want to make sure we have the right hardware.

 

[Goksly]

Aye tbh the database server doesnt really go over 40% at the moment... the company will not pay out for the additional cpu licencing and the hardware; I think the boost to a new high end server replacing the existing one (at least 3 years old, if not more) should see the company through any growth we see in the next few years and if the server is a dual socket, we can upgrade if we really need too (I'm assuming you can leave a 2nd socket empty?).

With the amount of usage we see, the server is never really handing more than 1 query at any given time, so 4 cores / 8 threads should easily be enough?

Before I joined the db was a proper mess with pretty much no indexing so the database was at 80% most of the time, if not higher.