Dedicated vs. Non-dedicated

[esteshk]

I know this has been often discussed here but I am having major disagreements with our hardware/networking wonks on how best to deployed FileMaker Server and a variety of other apps in our organization. The trend here is to spec big hulking servers with 2, 2 Ghz processors, 1 gig RAM, 6 Raid HD's, etc., etc., etc. They want to deploy all database servers on this single, $5000+ box. I argue that FileMaker, as well as the other database server apps, want a dedicated, lean, properly scaled box to run on. One particularly sallent (IMHO) reason I offer, is that a failure of this 1 big box (no matter how remote the possibility), would bring all these processes to a halt. This would be a bad thing! Still, the argument continues.

I have read all the posts on this board regarding the basing of FileMaker on a dedicated box, and have also read, and distributed to our engineering folks, the FileMaker Server Best Practices white paper. I would be interested in comments from the participants of FM Forums, particularly those using FMP Server in high use (100+ concurrent users) production environments.

Background: All of our servers run W2K Advanced Server. Clients are a mix of Windows and Macs. Is it conceivable that a hulking 2 processor (yes, I know FMP Server does not recognize the 2nd processor), mega ram (yes I know FMP Server uses only 40Mb), fast SCSI RAID drive server would run FileMaker and other database apps with acceptable performance? Any other ammo you guys could give me would be appreciated.

[Kurt Knippel]

2 issues:

First is the general idea that one big box is better than 2 smaller ones. Only the hardware manufacturers believe this. They want to sell you those big hulking machines, because the profist margins are high. In reality I have never encountered a situation where this worked as advertised. We almost always ended up adding additional machines. Most "server" software fights for the same processing resources and will generally conflict with each other in some way. No matter what the sales guy at the hardware or software vendor tells you.

I have found that database servers are particularly fussy in this regard. Does not matter if it is SQL Server, Oracle or Filemaker. They all work best all alone on thier own machine.

Filemaker in particular does not need much of a processor, nor does it need much RAM. It just needs a really fast disk.

[Anatoli]

I definitely agree with everything, but from my experience dual PII 200MHz box with NT4 was running without any slowdowns:

FM server 3

LanFax

WinProxy email server and Firewall

Print server SW

Disk sharing for 20 people

If you mix applications which are different on CPU and Disks demands it usually works OK, especially with excellent multitasking and multithreading OS and 2 processors.

I will still prefer separate boxes because of potential problems if that big iron gets down.