SEO

Hi,

I've been asked to spec a couple of Sun servers up for database usage
for the company I work for, however I'm not as experienced with Sun
hardware as I could be, and I seem to be getting more and more
confused.

At present we have one database running on a fully spec'd V890 with 8
ultrasparc IV+ 1.5Ghz processors and 32gbs of RAM. I've been asked to
spec out two new databases, one which will be handling 25% more load
than the existing one, and one that will be handling 50% less.

For the machine handling 25% more, it seems that within the price
range I can either look at a reasonably well spec'd E2900 (which
should give me the added "umphh" and a little room for upgrade or opt
for a M4000 or lowend M5000 box. I have no experience with the SPARC64
processors, and have none at this site to compare against. I wonder if
anyone has any experience with this family of servers and how they
compare to the UltraSparc IV+ boxes that we've been running
previously?

For the machine handling 50% less than the existing machine there are
some budget constraints, meaning we might be able to stretch to a
V440 fully spec'd (the budget would mean we couldn't afford room for
upgrade), or more realistically a T5220 with an 8 core processor and
32gbs or memory. We do have a couple of the coolthreads boxes here,
but these are T2000's which we generally use for apache httpd and
tomcat servers. It's my understanding that the T1 and T2 processors
are aimed more at this sort of activity than database usage due to
each core sharing an FPU? Does anyone have any experience of running
oracle on these machines? How do they rate against the UltrasparcIV+
servers in comparison? Is it worth getting one of these in on a try
before you buy deal or am I wasting my time?

If anyone can offer any insight, advice or real world experience that
would be massively appreciated.

Thanks.

K.