colin Leversuch-Roberts (2/25/2008)
you do want to go 64bit, forget x32. As for the rest I agree with Steve it's just difficult to know. I will disagree about NIC's there should never be one of anything - single point of failure, you'd want at least two nic's probably teamed.I've just spec'd a DW server - x64 4 x quad core ( although I'd prefer dual core AMD ) 64gb ram 42 15k disks + 10 internal sas. Note that most SAS disks only have a 10k spin speed so 15k scsi's will give you slightly better throughput and response.
I only have an estimated 100Gb of data at this time.
However it's really difficult to work it out - we were doing a data load test this afternoon - seems there's maybe a bit of a scaling issue - after 3 hours we'd managed about 10% load , run a 4 way quad core at 90% cpu solid and done the most io I've ever clocked on a query, 4.5 billion logical reads.
why AMD? their current lineup is years old and Intel finally has some good products on the market
i would also stay away from the old style SCSI disks even if they are 15k. SAS disks have bandwidth per hard drive. the SCSI disks is shared. the hard drive might spin faster, but the backend bus is a piece of junk and that is where your delay will be.
HP has 300GB 15k SAS drives now
love x64, but i swear we've had more weird problems with it than we ever did with windows 2000. blue screens from driver problems and MS even released several hotfixes to fix storage problems with windows 2003 SP2