Currently the Intel Nehalem is only available in "EP" format - the 2 socket version. The "EX" version that supports 4+ sockets will be coming out early next year. I'd guess after Nehalem-EX is out the DL5x0 lineup will have that processor. I'd guess a 2 socket Intel Nehalem-EP 5500 would easily satisfy your performance requirements. If you are an HP shop then I'd recommend looking at HP ProLiant DL180 G6. It comes in both a 12LFF or 25SFF drive (large/small form factor) chassis. There is also the DL370 G6 (but thats 4U, not 2U). Couple differences between the AMD Istanbul 6-core and the Intel Nehalem-EP is that AMD only takes DDR2 memory while Intel takes DDR3 which is faster, but the Istanbul has larger L1/L2/L3 caches. The DDR3 and QPI on the Nehalem are quite fast. I havent done any Oracle benchmarks to compare them but the Nehelam-EP stuff is very fast. On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 2:27 PM, Ray Feighery <rjfeighery@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On upgrading the server: There does not seem to be a HP DL 580 G6 > model available, or any 4-socket box from HP that has the 5500 > (Nehalem), although there is a 585 G6 with the AMD Opteron™ 8400 > Series processors. Not sure how they measure up. From a pure compute > point of view, a 2-socket box with quad-core 5500 would still give a > 2x improvement. > I hear what you are saying about Sun; we were a Solaris/Sun-only > company for years, but changed to Linux/HP and never regretted it. > Maybe it is time to reassess, but I like having only a few vendor > relationships to manage. > It's certainly something I will cost. > > ASM seems to be generally thought of as a Good Thing. I like the idea > behind hardware mirroring and ASM striping. Basically, I will need to > decide on some hardware and then test a few different configurations. -- Regards, Greg Rahn http://structureddata.org -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l