Hardware advice

Hi,

I am in the process of pricing up boxes for our database, and I was
wondering if anyone had any recommendations or comments.

The database itself will have around 100-150 users mostly accessing through
a PHP/apache interface. I don't expect lots of simultaneous activity,
however users will often be doing multiple table joins (can be up to 10-15
tables in one query). Also they will often be pulling out on the order of
250,000 rows (5-10 numeric fields per row), processing the data (I may split
this to a second box) and then writing back ~20,000 rows of data (2-3
numeric fields per row).

Estimating total amount of data is quite tricky, but it could grow to
100-250Gb over the next 3 years.

I have priced one box from the Dell web site as follows

Single Intel Xeon 2.8GHz with 512kb L2 cache
2GB RAM

36Gb 10,000rpm Ultra 3 160 SCSI
36Gb 10,000rpm Ultra 3 160 SCSI
146Gb 10,000rpm U320 SCSI
146Gb 10,000rpm U320 SCSI
146Gb 10,000rpm U320 SCSI

PERC 3/DC RAID Controller (128MB Cache)

RAID1 for 2x 36Gb drives
RAID5 for 3x 146Gb drives

Running RedHat Linux 8.0

This configuration would be pretty much the top of our budget (~ £5k).

I was planning on having the RAID1 setup for the OS and then the RAID5 for
the db files.

Would it be better to have a dual 2.4GHz setup rather than a single 2.8GHz
or would it not make much difference?

Does the RAID setup look ok, or would anyone forsee problems in this
context? (This machine can take a maximum of 5 internal drives).

Am I overdoing any particular component at the expense of another?

Any other comments would be most welcome.

Thanks for any help

Adam

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