My long awaited new database server arrived today! It has two, quad-core Xeon X5550 processors, 72GB of DDR3 RAM, and eight 73GB 10K SAS drives. I have hyper-threading enabled, so the OS sees 16 cores. Intel offers two slightly faster processors in the Xeon 55xx family, but they are considerably more expensive for a marginal performance increase.

We will be hanging several PowerVault MD1120 SAS arrays off of it, since we are moving off of our SAN. It has Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition, and we will be using x64 SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition SP1 CU4. So far, I have just installed and patched the OS, but this system is extremely fast.

I really cannot wait to get SQL Server 2008 installed and configured on this box…