Which is better?

[bearxor]

I'm getting ready to build an Exchange server for work and I was also going to upgrade our domain controllers to 2003 level while I was at it (of ocurse). Part of this is purchasing a new domain controller.

I had spec'd a couple of Dell rack servers for both of them. A 2U Quad-Core Xeon 1.83 and a 1U Dual-Core 2.33ghz Xeon. 2U for the Exchange and 1U for the DC. My dilema is that when I got a quote for both servers, the 2U quad was only $30 more than the 1U. The 2U also came with dual 160GB drives while the 1U only came with dual 80GB drives, so I'm sure that's the price discrepancy.

What would you guys do? Would the quad be better than the dual, especially in the future? We reuse a lot of equipment when we upgrade so 5-6 years down the line this equipment will likely be repurposed.

 

[SickBeast]

The quad sounds like a much better deal to me.

*edit* If you guys reuse components, going with a Dell might be a bad idea. Have you priced out building a rig yourself?

 

[bearxor]

Building ourselves isn't allowed. It's a very large corporation and they have a particular way things get done. We don't really reuse the components, I meant the whole server. Say, right now our DNS/DHCP is running a P3 500. When we upgrade to our new Exchange server, I'll likely take the old one, a Dual Xeon 2.4 and turn it in to a linux-based server. Or maybe one of these will become a Websense server in the future. Stuff like that.

The clock speed is my main catch point. It's a pretty signifcant difference and I'm just not sure if the two extra cores would make up for the 500mhz clock difference in the majority of applications. Either are really overkill for a domain controller anyways.

 

[cubeless]

multithreaded apps like u r looking at should be able to do more with the total powre of the quad than the dual...

 

[imported_re01590]

Either Processor will work fine. Processing power is rarely if ever bottleneck on exchange performance. You would be better served worrying about RAM and disk spindle count in planning an exchange implementation.

Processors are neat to brag about but any 64 bit processor will be plenty of horsepower for you. It sounds like you have a small number of clients but I would still recommend you concentrate on disks and raid levels. Two hard drives is pretty weak in terms of capacity and performance.

 

[bearxor]

I attracted someone's first post

The two 160's are going to be raid 1 for mailbox storage and a seperate boot/log drive. We limit our users at 100mb of storage space. At my branch of the company it's only 150 employees or so. We're just bumping the 16gb barrier on exchange 2000 std now.

Thinking I may go with two of the 1.83's then.