Hardware Recommendations for new Oracle Server

The lease on my current server is coming up, and I am working on trying to spec out a new machine.

Our current server is a simple dual 400 Xeon on a Compaq Proliant with 2GB of RAM. We have 2 Oracle Instances on it, Production and Development. We are currently running Oracle 8.1.7 on windows 2000 server.

The total size of the associated datafiles for each instance is about 7.3 GB, however, the amount of data in the datafiles is significantly less.

The data is fairly static with a minimal amount of inserts, deletes, and updates. Maybe 10,000 records total changed/inserted/deleted a day. What we do is GIS (geographic information systems) and we don't use Oracle Spatial. We use a third party software package (ESRI's SDE). Most of the work performed are select statement that return approximately 100,000 rows to a client to display a map and it needs to happen quickly. We also have some pretty complex views because our data is highly normalized.

I want some insight on the direction I head in buying a new server based on the following factors:

Money:
I have about $250,000 to spend on a server (or servers). Users:
Needs to support 150 users fairly easily. Uptime:
Needs to be up 24/7 (or as close as possible).

Based on our usage (low number of inserts/deletes/updates) and large result sets, I am guessing our most efficient use of resources would be to stock up on RAM. Our organization is an HP shop, and I was looking at an N Class server with 4 550MHz processors and 16 GB of RAM. Any comments? Does anyone recommend not using HP? Do to the recordsets, I believe that network performance is important. Should I get a gigabit network card and have it hooked straight into our switch?

What about any clustering solutions? Would anyone recommend sticking with Win2k?

Any insight would be much appreciated.

Sincerely,
W. Scott Moore Received on Tue Jul 31 2001 - 16:58:16 CDT