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I work for a large fortune 500 company. We have several SQL 2005 Servers running on DELL Poweredge 2950 with 8 GB RAM and 4 CPU's. Storage is DMX RAID 10. We are in the process of migrating to sql 2008. We are planning on consolidating multiple sql 2005 into single SQL 2008 Server.If anyone can suggest hardware I would appreciate. We have looked at DELL R710, I was wondering if there are other servers that are good for running SQL 2008. Thanks

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Product and service recommendations are specifically off topic for ServerFault (see point 4 in the NOT About section of the FAQ) – sysadmin1138♦ Jan 5 at 3:29
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closed as off topic by sysadmin1138♦ Jan 5 at 3:29

Questions on Server Fault are expected to generally relate to servers, networking, or desktop infrastructure, within the scope defined in the faq.

2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

AnandTech has a good article on CPU performance which may help in your CPU selection.

Benchmarks on the Intel Xeon X5570 are showing it to have a major advantage over the X5460 for SQL transactions/second.

Though brand loyalists may disagree with me, in my opinion when it comes to 2U rackmount servers HP, IBM and Dell don't really differ that much. I have yet to see a benchmark test that shows anything beyond marginal advantages provided by one over the other when built to the same spec. So if you and your IT counterparts are familar and happy with Dell, I'd say stick with Dell. If you are unhappy with them for some reason, maybe now is the time to give HP or IBM a shot.

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up vote 0 down vote

Do you have

  1. performance numbers on your current servers?
  2. Any expected growth of the load on the current databases, or other growth (new databases, etc?)

Without that, we can only give general answers.

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Sorry, We have performance numbers for the last few weeks,CPU Avg 10-20%,Batch requests /sec on the busiest server 200-300. Compilation/sec <5. Disk IO have been good.Buffer Cache hit ratio >95. Page Life expentancy>2k. We don't expect any growth of the DB's or planning on adding new DB's the DB's average 200 Gb. – Jay Mar 8 '10 at 19:57
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