Re: Recommended Wintel Hardware

I sincerely appreciate everyone's replies. Sadly (or happily depends on how you look at it) I'm not a DBA, but merely a network engineer trying to upgrade our 3+ year old servers.

Right now, our 4 processors average around 50% usage over a full 24-hours. During peak hours we hover around 75%. And because I'm planning on forklifting this old equipment out and replacing with completely new gear - I don't even know the full specs of the existing gear. I do know this: The filer will be faster, significantly faster, due to the old-school fiber channel crap we are using right now. Also, the filer will be connected via 2 channeled cu-gig connections, and the server will as well.

So, knowing that, I'm eyeballing the Dell PE2650. It has dual hyperthreading xeon processors - to win2k it looks like a 4-proc system, but I'm not sure how that translates to real-life. But going from four P3-700Mhz to two P4-Xeon-2.6Ghz, coupled with PCI-X133, 533Mhz FSB, and 200MHz DDR SDRAM, I think this machine will run circles around the old beast.

These procs only have 512K of cache, and I'm not truly sure what hyperthreading buys me though. Do you think this is a concern?

Thanks again,

Eric Brander Received on Fri Jun 20 2003 - 09:00:23 CDT