Server help/recommendations

I'm looking for a little help in sizing out a server and storage for a customer using our app. Here's the problem -

They want to import roughly 50 gigabytes of data a day into our database. Normally, we then full-text index all the data (we might look at filtering it first based on metadata, depending on user requirements). This means that the system needs a fair amount of I/O capacity and the ability to index the data. The app itself will run select statements and updates. There won't be many users on the system though (only 15-20).

We're limited to windows 2003 Server and Oracle 10g (based on the customer's SAs knowledge - and they aren't willing to entertain hiring/training Unix or Linux experts).

We're looking at a couple of different options. Unisys' ES7000 with 8 processors (a rough guess on our part) in both 64 bit and 32 bit. We don't have any experience with 64 bit so we're not sure if we want to add that to our learning curve. In addition we're looking at server clustering and Oracle RAC. We're not sure how many nodes and instances we'll need or if they're better than the monolithic Unisys box from a cost/performance standpoint. One of the hardware clusters were looking at is the Egenera servers.

Any thoughts?
Thanks. Received on Fri Jan 07 2005 - 14:22:12 CST