Buck said:
I am looking to put a Peachtree Database & yet unprogrammed Access database server together with the following stuff ...
I was thinking this would be flexible enough for growth and needs over the next several years. Any comments?
Until you corrected it, I was going to comment that the display card is a Turbo Cache model. Although the shared memory probably isn't supposed to kick in if you're not using 3D, in a server it makes me nervous.
Opteron can be considerably more effective than Xeon, which in turn has lousy scalability. In some applications, one Opteron is worth two Xeons. I agree with Merc - dual Opterons sounds like overkill here.
I assume that Peachtree will also be using an Access backend to start with? If so, you're configuring a file server more than a database server, and dual CPUs will be a complete waste of time.
As a rough rule of thumb, I'd allow for one CPU for every 4GB of RAM. A corollary is that if you need less than 4GB, you probably only need one CPU (processor-intensive apps aside). Given that Opteron-specific features such as larger cache are to support multiple CPUs, a further corollary is that you probably only need an Athlon 64. I no longer believe that ECC RAM is necessary for the sort of server you're describing - IMO you're far more likely to see corruption from software etc than from a stray bit every few years.
Dropping ECC should halve your RAM costs, meaning you can double it to a more useful size. It would be nice to fully utilize DIMM slots with 1GB modules rather than 512MB. Enough to allow full caching of the data will help disguise the sluggish drives. BTW, MS SQL server includes its own memory management and doesn't like to share. M$ Exchange may be better on another box if there's real traffic.
For a true database server app, Raptor drives deliver about twice the throughput as 7200rpm desktop units. With MS Access, the performance gain is not as dramatic because it's limited by the network speed - consider Gigabit LAN if the database is more than a couple of hundred MB. Actually, consider getting rid of Access.
Remember that ATA/SATA drives have poor write performance under heavy multi-user loads. If data is really critical, write-caching on the drives should be disabled and a battery-backed caching controller added.
Why do you have only a single boot drive? Is downtime not an issue for this server? What about a redundant power supply?
Do you really need 200GB in the mirror? How do you intend to back it up?
