4U Case with dual 600W hotswap PSUs - $524
Motherboard w/
Dual Gigabit LAN
SATA RAID - $500
Dual Xeon 3ghz - $540
4GB RAM - $598
8 250GB SATA HDs - $720
2 SATA Backplanes for HD hotswap/RAID - $300
Aprox. Total Cost
$3,200
Requirements:
1. rackmount
2. 2 to 8 CPU's (hopefully dual-core)
3. fast RAM 8 GB
4. very good hard drives (fast and reliable) -- SAS or SCSI
5. redundant power supplies
6. Good RAID controller -- RAID 5 config
7. 6 to 8 drives (for performance)
8. profrssionally built
9. 3 year warranty
10. 2 NICs (onboard OK)
11. 2 to 4 U (Rackmount height)
12. Hot-swappable disks
13. parts must be linux compatible RedHat (most are, but it's good to know)
Nice to have:
1. Hot-swappable power
2. Hot-swappable fans
Depending on what you look at, 4/8 CPU servers are very expensive. 2 CPU servers are a more prudent buy, but don't allow easy scaling, though maybe that's not too bad. I mean, it might just make sense to seperate out the database server from the webserver / gameserver. That would probably be a more frugal option, now that I think about it.
So I could go with a 2-server solution. The database does have quite a bit of a load on it typically, and putting all that in a seperate server isn't that bad of an idea. Though then the only issue is that we'll want high-end RAID systems and power supply redundancy in both systems, which might just land us in the 4-CPU ball park again.
I have contacted a few vendors with what I'm looking for, we'll see what kind of prices they come back with. I'm sick of stuff dying on me, so I want to go with something high-end.