Recommend which Proliant ML370 server?

I'm about to buy a new server to run a new Oracle 10g application. My employer wants to only buy a dual processor Proliant box since the Oracle will be per-processor licensed, it will run Windows 2003 Server. We'd originally planned to buy a Proliant ML370 G3 machine with the dual 3.2GHz Xeons that have 533MHz FSB speed, 512k L2 cache and 2MB L3 cache and 4GB memory. This older G3 machine is still avaliable to us right now, although HP has just now announced the new G4 series with the new processor architecture that has 800MHz FSB with dual channel PC3200 memory, and the processors are still 3.2 or 3.4GHz but do not have any L3 cache at all, only 1MB L2 cache.

My gut feeling is that the new G4 machine should be the obvious way to go, but my boss is trying to tell me that the difference in 533 vs 800 FSB speed will be negligable and that the 2MB of L3 cache in the year-old technology will run Oracle better.

Who's right?

We intend to use a dual channel SmartArray 6402/256 disk controller, and put two 15K rpm drives into the two middle drive cage slots, as a RAID1 volume on one channel of the controller to hold the redo logs, and the six-drive cage will be a RAID5 volume on the other channel of the controller to be the main "Drive C:" for the operating system, Oracle executables and also hold all the other database files.

The database app will be mostly reading the data, not writing to the database... probably 80% read / 20% write. We think that this box will have ample horsepower to give satisfactory performance writing to database files residing on RAID5. We really don't have the extra budget to go hog-wild on extra discs, controllers, physical partitioning, etc., like what a perfectionist would do with limitless money.

Any thoughts on this? Received on Thu Sep 09 2004 - 14:19:48 CDT