The Question and Answer Board

[jhalada]

Bob,

Thanks for the info on the hardware.

I think you should really be thinking Opteron across the board, definitely any new purchase should be Opteron based. Xeon (all varieties) range from barely competitive to completely outclassed. Just for the memory bandwidth, Xeon 4600 has 3.2 GB/s, while dual Opteron has 10.8 or 12.8 GB/s (depending on whether memory is PC-2700 or PC3200 - registered) at lower latency than Dell 4600, which (in addition to performance of disk storage) are keys to better database performance.

For webserver, I would go with HP DL145. Absolute top of the line, dual Opteron 248 with 4 GB of memory (expandable to 16GB is just a little over $5000 (excluding storage, which can be either IDE or SCSI), but something like that is on par with your database server. For webserver, a more pedestrian setup would be more appropriate, definitely price competitive, way higher on performance basis, with 64bit future - while Dell Xeons will be dead end at the time of signing of the check to pay for them.

This is what HP says, comparing their Xeon vs. their Opteron for web serving (serving static and dynamic content).
http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/benchmarks/dl145-webbench.pdf
It is definitely eye-opening to see that a single Opteron 248 outperforms dual Xeon 3.2 on webserving, and of course, you can get the second Opteron processor.

IBM offers dual Opteron server as well:
http://www-132.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?catalogId=-840&storeId=1&ca...
(A little more expensive than HP. It can be ordered with IDE, but SCSI controller is built in, pushing the price up a bit)

Another dual Opteron server from Sun: http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v20z/
(same problem as Dell, no default IDE option).

Enough about hardware, I am curious if tere is a plan to do something about improving the search capability on SI. That is something that would be #2 on my wish list, just behind improved responsiveness of the database / web servers.

Joe