Powerful Dense Server Suggestions Please

  • We're currently running our production SQL Servers on 4U HP DL585s (4x dual-core AMDs). We continue to grow, scaling out through a multi-tenent architecture that allows us to split data across many databases. We are about to implement mirroring for every database, adding many more servers to the mix. We are also building out an additional datacenter for DR with warm standbys for everything plus its own live databases.

    With all the servers at 4U each, rack space is becoming a serious issue. We're looking for dense, powerful database servers. Several of the databases are > 1TB, and the application performs hundreds of millions of transactions per day, so some simple blades or virtualization won't help. On top of lots of CPU, we need to be able to load up RAM and include several 4Gb fiber HBAs.

    Do any of you have experience with or starting to evaluate dense, beefy servers? Sun has a 2U 4-socket quad-core Intel box we're beginning to get info on. Anything else like that out there worth looking at? I've seen some blade offerings that take up to 4 quad-core CPUs and 64GB of RAM, but I'm unsure as to what can be done with fiber connections to the SANs.

    -Eddie

    Eddie Wuerch
    MCM: SQL

  • Hi,

    Worked on a project about 6 months ago and we decided to go for the HP p-Class Blade hardware, as this provided a great deal of consolidation and power in a small footprint and abilty of blade units to failover between on another is a great benefit.

    In terms of SAN connectivity, you have a host of options available via interconnect devices within the blade unit is another benefit.

    Thanks,

    Phillip Cox

  • If you're after some serious density and compute power take a look at Sun's Sun Blade 8000/8000p Chassis & Blades... they offer a quad proc blade and each blad has it's own PCI slots hosted by the chassis... URL is http://www.sun.com/servers/blades/x8400/specs.xml.

    One thing to watch out for/be sure to discuss with your data center folks is power and network connectivity (both IP & SAN) as I've seen situations where you just can't load up a rack beyond a certain power consumption and/or number of network ports.

    Joe

  • HP recently came out with the DL 580 G4. 4 quad core CPU's and with next year's RAM it will support up to 256GB of RAM per server

    if you need local storage than it has 16 drive bays

    personally i would love a 2U machine like this without the local storage that we can connect to a SAN

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