[H-GEN] Decisions, decisions....

[Michael Anthon]

I am currently facing a bit of a dilemma.  I am charged with the task of
purchasing a new server for work and I have to make some decisions
regarding the best configuration.  Now, this is probably a little off
topic for this list, since this machine will have to run NT because we
have to run MS SQL Server (don't blame me !!!!), but I was hoping a
little sage advise might be forthcoming.  The up side of this new
machine is that our old NT server (which acts as internet gateway and
file server) will have a decent OS installed into it (namely Linux of
course).

Now, the quandary is this... what do I buy?  While I don't have an
unlimited budget, it IS fairly healthy.  I was thinking of getting a
dual P2/333MHz/256M RAM with 3x6.4G Quantum Fireballs (Ultra-SCSI, 11mS)
however I don't have enough experience of these high end machines to
make a judgement on the following possibilities.

Will the system be I/O bound?  The SQL queries that will be running on
this machine may be quite large (I'm talking regular table scans on
several tables around 200M in size).  I have seen on some high end
systems running SQL server that running a query like this is only using
a limited amount of processor time since the whole thing is slowed down
by disk access speeds.  For example, if a large query is only using 20%
of processor time, then there is no advantage in adding a second CPU is
there ?  The machine in question was a Compaq PPro266/160M RAM, the
machine also has a hardware RAID controller, but I never discovered if
it was IDE or SCSI drives.  It FEELS awfully slow for the type of
machine.

Would I be better off getting a single processor box and throwing more
memory in it?

With respect to the drives, I can get some Cheetahs (Ultra Wide SCSI,
7.5mS), but the cost is quite a bit higher.  Am I better off with 2 fast
drives or 3 slightly slower ones?  
Would I get better performance by adding a second SCSI controller and
splitting the drives onto separate buses?

While I'm on the subject, does anyone know if there is a version of
Oracle for Linux ?

Any thoughts/comments on this topic would be greatly appreciated.

Regards
Michael Anthon

TAMS Systems