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RSchiererFlag for United States of America

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New data center hardware, what do I need?

I will be sitting down tomorrow with a local hosting facility to discuss creating a small data center dedicated to my web portal and I would like to know given the following facts, what I should make sure that I get, any questions that I should make sure that I ask the hosting faciltiy and hardware recommendations.

We have a web portal that will be accessed by the medical community. One server will host IIS and Sharepoint, the second will host SQL Server 2005. The website's front end is Sharepoint and the backend is SQL. Storage will be separate.

As we are a new company working with limited funds, we are interested in an offering from the hosting facility to use their Infrastructure as a Service model. We can pay a monthly fee after startup costs for only what we need and can expand easily [more servers, more storage] as our traffic grows.

We need to be redundant and able to expand easily. Our test data center was running IIS and Sharepoint as VMware servers and storage, and separate dedicated Dell boxes for SQL.

We were thinking about using 2 VMware servers each with a copy of the website and Sharepoint loaded on them. Just in case one server goes down we have the second. We thought that as traffic increased we could add another VMware server with IIS and Sharepoint. We thought that we would need to purchase dedicated boxes for SQL as we have been told that SQL when it starts getting a lot of activity will not run smoothly. [is this true?] We also want to use load balancing so that as traffic and processes increased the 2 SQL servers and VMware servers can share the load. And as we grow and add more VM's and SQL boxes redundancy and load balancing will become more important.

We will be using their SANs and paying for 100GB increments. As we grow and we will grow as part of our offereing is to become a repository for our clients data. And this is another reason why we want to use this kind of model, because we have no idea how fast the data or traffic will grow.

Some of my questions I would like answered are:
How many processors for the SQL servers?
How much memory for both VM's and SQL servers?
What is needed to load balance?

thanks in advance. I know I will get some great responses as this is the reason I keep coming back here with my questions.
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dkarpekin

Due to the fact , that you are small company, you might be better off lease hardware - you will need 2-3 boxes, each around $200/month.
After you established, and will realize, that hardware is not handling traffic, or have other related problem, than you can think about moving over to particular hardware.
At this point it is too much varibles, and will be waist of money, hardware getting cheaper and better every day, and do preize calculation is totaly overdo.
Um,  if it takes $400/month for leasing a total of 2 servers for 12 months that's  $4,800, and you own nothing after those 12 months.  For prices like that, you can possibly buy a server and have it more than meet your needs for years,  it just depends on how quickly you anticipate growing.

If you expect to have a million visitors a day in a year, it's very different from expecting  1000 visitors a day avg a year from now.


I would start with 1 or 2 servers compatible with ESXi hypervisor and use the free single server partitioning license.    

Get decent hardware: something 64-bit with a bare minimum 4 cores at minimum of 2ghz each,  i.e. a  quad-core proc,  or a dual cpu-socket system with 2 dual-core CPUs,  8gb RAM,  actually:  perhaps 16gb of RAM to provide extra room for development.

All this and more can be had for under $2000 per server, if you look hard enough.



As the site grows, it will eventually not be enough, but just getting started, I think both SQL Server  and the frontend can be virtual machines.


It just depends on how much traffic   and how sane the demands are being placed on the hardware.

Until you have large databases constantly being accessed and in particular updated by dozens of users,  the I/O  limitations of a virtual machine are not a major issue.
Be sure to install VMware tools on the VMs as there is a considerable performance difference,  and provide ample hardware.

Yes, virtualization has overhead.


However: if you are planning to scale this to a massive site; the first mistake is using Frontpage/IIS as a frontend.    And the second mistake is using SQL server as your backend.


I wonder if SAN storage you pay for is cost-effective...  local drives may be much cheaper.

The advantage of SAN storage is it's shared between servers.
(Can very easily move a VM to the other server, by shutting it down, de-registering, re-registering)

Maybe use local disk as backup,  in addition to some type of offsite storage.

Consider UPS and generator capacity available at the location.  


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dkarpekin

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You both have brought really interesting thoughts to the table.

My reason for going with the Infrastructure as a Service instead of leasing or buying is the initial startup costs and the ability to have the host add more memory or SAN space.

Once we have been up and running and found our 'sweet spot' when it comes to configuration, we will have the accountants crunch the numbers to decide where the point is when it is better to buy/lease than to 'rent' the Infrastructure.

I like your reference to not using SQL. It was not something that I thought of not using. I guess perhaps we could use Oracle or go with an AS400 when we get bigger.

So if I read you right, for the SQL boxes, 4 cores, 16GB RAM as a starting point. Which is along the lines of what I had thought also.

Any other ideas, thoughts, concerns about this project that you have would be greatly appreciated.
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