Posted by Stu on 10/21/05 15:57

Hardware requirements will vary, but a bad application on very good
hardware will just have more room to underperform. It's hard giving
advice without knowing more about your scenario:

1. Are you running an OLAP or OLTP application?
2. You're planning on developing on the same box? Bad idea, but
perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.
3. How many other databases are you using? What's the overall amount
of data you're looking at? How many users?
4. What's your anticipated growth rate? How critical is this
database, and how will you manage redundancy?
5. What's your current bottleneck? CPU, memory, disk space, network
traffic?

You may want to see if you can pick up an article from SQL Server
magazine by Kevin Kline called Bare Metal Tuning; pretty informative
when it comes to these sorts of questions.

If you want to skip ahead, buy the most expensive box with the biggest
set of hard drives and the most memory you can afford at this time and
the fastest CPU, and then kick yourself hard when the prices drop next
year. :)

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