Server for MS SQL Server

[Jabali]

Hi guys,

 

I need to acquire a server for our SQL Server database.

The database itself if about 50GB.

We are currently on a shared DB which keeps running out of temp space.

What would be a good config for SQL DB server?

 

I am fairly certain that it does not take advantage of multiple cores.

So I am looking for some server processor that has few cores, with each core capable of about 2.8 GHz. (Intel Xeon E7 8890?)

64 GB RAM

1TB SSD (Suggestions for higher speed storage would be welcome)

 

Any and all suggestions are welcome. I have no idea what I am doing. Never built a server. So its all new to me.

[leadeater]

15 minutes ago, Jabali said:

I need to acquire a server for our SQL Server database.

The database itself if about 50GB.

I'm assuming you mean MS SQL and not a different SQL database engine like MySQL or Postgre?

 

15 minutes ago, Jabali said:

We are currently on a shared DB which keeps running out of temp space.

Just give it more space?

 

15 minutes ago, Jabali said:

I am fairly certain that it does not take advantage of multiple cores.

MS SQL can use basically as many cores as you can throw at it, the limiting factor is data/table structure and query design. MS SQL is about as top class as you can get relational database engine wise.

 

Other factors to look at is the server setting of Max Parallelism so a single query can't take/block all CPU cores and degrade other running query performance.

 

15 minutes ago, Jabali said:

So I am looking for some server processor that has few cores, with each core capable of about 2.8 GHz. (Intel Xeon E7 8890?)

64 GB RAM

1TB SSD (Suggestions for higher speed storage would be welcome)

What is the current specs of the server the database is on now? For a 50GB database you won't need 64GB of ram, unless it's some kind of special highly accessed database with odd access patterns 16GB will be fine and 32GB will be a lot.

 

Also why so much storage when the database is so small? For the most part data comes out of ram so putting blistering fast storage behind MS SQL won't necessarily lead to higher performance than another lower class but fast storage.

[NelizMastr]

We have customers running SAP Business One environments with much larger SQL databases on servers with a single 6 or 8-core CPU, SAS 15K storage and 32-64GB of RAM without any performance issues whatsoever, so I agree with @leadeater here that there's really no point in throwing so much hardware at a rather small database.