Oracle 8i on NT - Your Opinions

Hi

We are in the midst of setting up a small to medium size project for some chemistry tracking procedures. We are using a commercial product that will act as a front end to the chem stuff but uses Oracle as a back end. We were considering using Oracle on NT (8i) as our database server to leverage some of our existing experience and to perserve the sanity of the specialist we are going to hire that will have to maintain an IIS web server and act as a part time dba. Learning 1 system is always easier than 2 distinct like NT and Solaris.

We anticipate 1 heavy user to generate about 5 mb of data per week for the first year of the project. The others should be well under 1 mb absolute max per week. After the initial data explosion - we know that the users will be focusing in on specific portions and resting some of their results with the data already entered and adding a minimal amount of new data. We are a research institute and not a commercial enterprise. In other words, as the project goes on we should not have large data requirements. We were going to leverage the Oracle server machine to store some web results and act as a backend to some data that we were going to present on the web. Not a whole lot.

Some of our IT folks are extremely adamant that we should not choose NT and go Solaris. My question to the Oracle gurus is whether or not we are totally off base in attempting to use NT. What are your opinions - pro and con. How well does it run as compared to Solaris, is it stable, what type of hardware would we need.

We were thinking of something along the following lines for hardware:

·	Dual Processor 933MHz with 256K Cache,P3 Xeon
·	2GB RAM,133MHz,8 X 256MB DIMMs
·	PERC3-Di RAID Enabler Kit with128MB Cache
·	2x18G,10K,1.0 IN,U3,Removable,w/Cage
·	8-Bay Split 2 X 4 Hard DriveCage 
·	6X18GB 10000RPM,1.0 IN,U3,HardDrives

Perhaps a Dell Poweredge 4400.

Thanks

jph Received on Sun Feb 11 2001 - 12:25:03 CST