Hi all,

We are moving out mangaed host to a more reliable, and larger scale company. In doing this we need to give them specs on the machine we want. Our Current setup is this:

DELL PowerEdge 1950 XEON E5335 DDR2 667MHz PC2-5300 16GB Upgradeable to 64GB 500GB


For the same price we will be possibly going with this setup:

DELL PowerEdge R710 XEON X5647 DDR3 1066MHz PC3-8500 64GB Upgradeable to 144GB 4X 250GB



This is an ecommerce site with anticipated 3-5K visits per day. Our database is large, not huge. 45,000 products plus categories and Magento data. Our site with SQL TARs down to 39GB plus media/images/javascript/css (hosted on a cloud).

Some history: Our hosted solution had some major problems. 1 being whenever a major storm would come through the site would be down until whatever utility lines could be repaired. Our new host has a dedicated underground fiber optic running to a main Seattle Hub, and has 18 days of diesel generator backup.

Second our server response time was TERRIBLE. 7-10 seconds and on a bad day 15-20. I have a development exact clone of the site running on a small i7 server locally and the response including page load is less than 3 seconds on heavy pages, less than 2 on homepage and content pages. I'd say network and/or Equipment mismanagement is probably the culprit here.

We are going to install the latest Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release that way we get 5 year support range. The current setup is Apache/PHP on 10.04 LTS.

Should this hardware configuration (2 servers -- 1 for content, one for data) be sufficient given the limited information I have provided?

ANY comments, thought hesitations or questions appreciated!

-- Zak