Hardware Recommendations/advice

Any great links or advice on buying mid-to-high-end hardware for a SQL 2000
OLTP environment?
I'm trying to get the most bang for my buck and have about $80K-$125K for
hardware. My primary need is for lots of I/O. Trying to decide between
multiple SCSI channels or a newer generation FC SAN solution. I know I want
at least 28 physical disks connected to the system. Thinking of either a
Clustered SAN solution or shared-nothing (mirroring/log shipping) for
redundancy.
I've got a total of 68 databases to run on it. The largest is about 80G of
data; most are pretty small (200-500Mbytes). Total is about 120G of data and
10G of transaction log files. Looking for substantially greater I/O capacity
(especially write) and considering servers with 8G or more of RAM to better
cache the data and reduce I/O requirements. Not needing a ton of CPU power.
Currently 4 550Mhz xeons handle the load running at 20% CPU pretty easily.
Thinking a modern 2CPU system (Xeon, Opteron, or Itanium) would provide
plenty of CPU for my needs as it will be faster than my current server.
Currently running 1999 era hardware (and wanting at least 2-3 times I/O
capacity for future growth):
Dell 2650 with 4 550Mhz Xeons, 4Gbytes of RAM
Dell 650F FC SAN (1Gbit, 512M cache), 30 15K RPM disks
Thanks for any help!!
Phil MattsonPhillip,
That's a big decision to make over a few newsgroup posts but here are some
general comments. If your looking for lots of IO then a SAN is a good
choice. You can start out with a minimal config to keep costs down but will
have room to grow if needed. If your really talking 70 DB's then you should
probably give more thought to a clustered solution vs Log shipping. It can
get to be a nightmare if you have to fail over 70 DB's at one time with Log
shipping. A word of caution in going from 4 cpu's to 2. Although the newer
cpu's would be much faster there are times when more vs faster can be
beneficial when you have lots of users. If you are running at 20% or less
now it may be OK but you need to get a handle on how much parallel
operations are occurring now and how they are used.
Andrew J. Kelly SQL MVP
"Philip Mattson" <philm@.nwsoft.com> wrote in message
news:%23N6c15HjEHA.1040@.TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
> Any great links or advice on buying mid-to-high-end hardware for a SQL
2000
> OLTP environment?
> I'm trying to get the most bang for my buck and have about $80K-$125K for
> hardware. My primary need is for lots of I/O. Trying to decide between
> multiple SCSI channels or a newer generation FC SAN solution. I know I
want
> at least 28 physical disks connected to the system. Thinking of either a
> Clustered SAN solution or shared-nothing (mirroring/log shipping) for
> redundancy.
> I've got a total of 68 databases to run on it. The largest is about 80G of
> data; most are pretty small (200-500Mbytes). Total is about 120G of data
and
> 10G of transaction log files. Looking for substantially greater I/O
capacity
> (especially write) and considering servers with 8G or more of RAM to
better
> cache the data and reduce I/O requirements. Not needing a ton of CPU
power.
> Currently 4 550Mhz xeons handle the load running at 20% CPU pretty easily.
> Thinking a modern 2CPU system (Xeon, Opteron, or Itanium) would provide
> plenty of CPU for my needs as it will be faster than my current server.
> Currently running 1999 era hardware (and wanting at least 2-3 times I/O
> capacity for future growth):
> Dell 2650 with 4 550Mhz Xeons, 4Gbytes of RAM
> Dell 650F FC SAN (1Gbit, 512M cache), 30 15K RPM disks
>
> Thanks for any help!!
> Phil Mattson
>
>