Planning Database Servers

2. Really depends upon your workload. In your case, SaaS for CRM you're likely going to need RAID-10 SAN for most of your needs - but you might also want to consider RAID-0 Intel SSDs for your tempdbs as well - that would likely do wonders for your end users (though you'll periodically want to 'reset' those SSDs to account for gradual performance degradation due to writes)

3. Yup. Just make sure your RAID controller won't get saturated by whatever you're putting on it via either SSD or any other RAID.

4. That really depends upon a ton of variables.

5. Depends upon network traffic. Most likely you won't need it. But if you're using iSCSI... or any other HEAVY traffic back and forth between your servers, then you'll want to look into it. Otherwise... I kind of doubt your end-users will be able to saturate your NICs well enough to really have to worry about TOE as it's primarily for internal networks.

6. I have in the past. It's a single point of failure that you can easily address these days. It HAS saved my bacon in one or two instances.

7. If you're doing SaaS just make sure your SLAs permit you to NOT incur much down time. Otherwise, I'd highly recommend clustering - even if you end up using significantly lower-powered hardware on the passive node. Otherwise, I'm partial to log shipping as I've spent a few too many cases tracking down strange/goofy performance bottlenecks that keep mirroring from keeping up with really large workloads... Remember too that when building SQL Server Clusters, you only have to pay the SQL Server License for the sockets on the biggest (potentially) ACTIVE cluster. i.e., if you get a 4 CPU box (with 4 cores per CPU) you'd 'only' have to pay $100k for 4xEnterprise Licenses of SQL Server because you don't need to license the passive nodes in the cluster. (Though, you DO have to license the OS on those boxes - and pay for their hardware, obviously.)

2. SAS 15K rpm. is the choice. Apart from that, HP hardware, so I cannot advice regarding DELL.

3. Yes

4. My experience as a DBA told me this: 2 X QUAD, 8 GB of RAM and a poorly configured disk subsystem (meaning 2 X RAID 5, 3 disks each, 2 databases) could cope with around 400 users (one DB was writing logs, while the other was being read, mostly). The trouble started when maintenance was to take place:-) (I did index defrags weekly, full backups weekly, plus daily diffs, to mention a few).

7. I had a cluster; apart from that, the thing with mirroring is rather simple: depends on what you log: index rebuilds I know to be a nightmare. I also remember seeing a discussion like this on one of the forums (was is SQL Server Central?) and for a heavily loaded server, only one DB could be mirrored, while on a light one, around 25 DBs were mirrored. So pick your choice:-).

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1. R900 and the occasional R710

2. SAS 15K

3. Yes

6. Yes

This is just my personal opinion (based on experience) but I would say Dell makes great desktop machines but has been lacking in the high end server market. My company used to buy Compaq Proliant Servers (way back when) and then switched to Dell Servers because they were much cheaper. And that is what they were, much cheaper, we had many hardware and firmware issues that affected our database servers and to make a long story short we switched back to HP servers a few years ago and have been very satisfied (no more pages at 2AM because server has crashed). Again this is past history and perhaps Dell has improved their machines recently but since you were soliciting opinions I wanted to share mine.