Can you spec me a web sever?

[rob4001]

What I want the sever to do:

-receive incoming images from 4 to 16mb some images can be just a single images some 100-200 images
-receive uncompressed images then process and send them out out to 300 users in a lossless format
-workstations will be using a webviewer to view the uncompressed images so I presume the sever will need similar software.
-be able to do this whilst having full anti virus capabilities and not suffer too much slow down.

I have no idea what kind of hardware would be need to do this so help would be appreciated. Money is not an issue but just need something to do the job not overkill.

Many thanks

[GoNz0]

if money's no object, a pair of quad core xeon's and 16-32gb ram, at least 5 hard drives in raid 5

[rob4001]

and if money were to become an issue?

[Jay]

depends on the budget really.

It sounds like you are goin to need a SAN for the storage and a couple of QuadCore's to get the image processing done in a decent amount of time. Is there no way you could cluster this? Its a lot of grunt for one server, think about the issues if thes ever was to go down?

Don't forget , with microsoft , once you get over 4 CPUs you are looking at Advanced Server and this really starts to add up in price (although you can now run 4 instances of Advanced server in a VM on one licence)

[Funkstar]

I have no idea what kind of hardware would be need to do this so help would be appreciated. Money is not an issue but just need something to do the job not overkill.

My thinking would be that whatever you buy now is going to be unsuitable when the load increases in the future, so a complete system you can expand (relatively) easily is probably the best bet, as jay suggested, clustering could be a very effective way to deal with this. Or there are the IBM/HP computing on demand servers. This is where you get a massive ammount of processing power in a huge box, but only the power you need is turned on. If you want more, you give them money, they log in and turn on more processors etc. A very cool use of virtulisation really

I also would have thought it would be an idea to put together a system and benchmark it using your data and software, then work out what the actual demands on the server are.For example are you limited with processing power, disk IO, memory IO, etc. I guess you could use desktop parts for the test system as it isn't going to be live, so saving some money initially.

[rob4001]

We have a couple of SAN severs which are raided and mirrored with 8TB of storage we need the web sever to process those images from uncompressed to a lossless compressed state then send them out to the users pc's.