What hardware setup do we need for our purposes?

[rogerzebra]

Hi all,
I would appreciate if someone with server setup experience can point me in a direction or were to go to meet our needs regarding hardware setup. We are working on a CMS system using PHP and MySQL on a Apache webserver which will be a local setup. We are today 7 employees at the office and plan to run this system for another 10 in a year from now. So, we are looking at approximately 20 to 25 users as a total.
We have already decide to use a Windows 3000 server environment but we are not sure what type of hardware setup we should go with.

So, the questions is what do we need to run a safe and efficient environment which suits our needs? How many harddrives do we need for our purposes? Do we need to run RAID discs? How do they work? Please explain RAID 0+1 stripped/mirrored?
Should we go with 2 processors? Do we need to separate the server our webpage is on?

All inputs on this subject is valuable for us and much apprecited.
/rz

 

[mrdenny]

With a low user load of up to 20-25 people a single server will work fine. If you plan on getting up to 100+ users in the future then 2 servers will be better.

I always recommend a dual processor server. Thay way you've got the power if you need it. It's cheeper to over buy now than to have to upgrade later.

Basically a RAID 0+1 array is two RAID 0 arrays mirrors together. This FAQ faq962-5747 was written for SQL Server, but the RAID info still applies no matter what you are using.

Denny
MCSA (2003) / MCDBA (SQL 2000)

--Anything is possible. All it takes is a little research. (Me)

http://www.mrdenny.com

(Not quite so old any more.)

 

[rogerzebra]

Thank you mrdenny,
I really appreciate your effort. I have a question for you though which I didn't quite understood in your explanation.

When deciding what size your server qualifies as, be sure to enclude size in this. For example a server with 5 users, and 5 TPS, that is 800 GB in size, would be a large database server.

This 800 GB in size sounds a lot to me, for 5 users. Am I getting this right? Would appreciate your input again.
/rz

 

[mrdenny]

An 800 GB database for 5 users would be very large, but it could happen. If it was a reporting database that only a couple of people used, it would have only 5 users, but lots of information that those people would use.

Denny
MCSA (2003) / MCDBA (SQL 2000)

--Anything is possible. All it takes is a little research. (Me)

http://www.mrdenny.com

(Not quite so old any more.)

 

[rogerzebra]

Thanks mrdenny,
I really appreciate it.
/rz