Hi we are looking to update our ageing server (G4 Xserve) to a new one. I was hoping might get some recommendations for hardware.

Proposed useage;

1) Backup asides, looking to run a two disk server with apps and system on one and data on other.

2) data disk will have a lot of office type software plus largish CAD file. We also use filemaker for numerous uses and may have 6 or 10 hosted at any time but none of them are what you might call massive on an enterprise scale but heavily utilise calculations and scripts and can reference large numbers of photos.

I guess we can always add another disk later if the databases start to impact on the saving and loading of CAD files but am interested if there is any likely value in;

1) lots of RAM - say more than 4Gb

2) two CPU for 8 cores over the single chip 4 core

the spec below are the proposed softwares

I've no experience in the matter, but the only thing I can offer (based on research) is that OS X is poor at thread handling/scheduling on a per-core basis, and that adding additional cores -should- make the performance (specifically of filemaker, due to the fact that it's a db which utilizes a large numbre of threads) better.

I've yet to figure out if filemaker is designed to utilize multiple cores, however... -/