Ideal Hardware?

We have an opportunity to purchase a new, top-notch database server. I am
wondering what kind of hardware is recommended? We're on Linux platforms and
kernels though. I remember a comment from Tom about how he was spending a
lot of time debugging problems which turned out to be hardware-related. I of
course would like to avoid that.

In terms of numbers, we expect have an average of 100 active connections
(most of which are idle 9/10ths of the time), with about 85% reading
traffic. I expect the database with flow average 10-20kBps under moderate
load. I hope to have one server host about 1000-2000 active databases, with
the largest being about 60 meg (no blobs). Inactive databases will only be
for reading (archival) purposes, and will seldom be accessed.

Does any of this represent a problem for Postgres? The datasets are
typically not that large, only a few queries on a few databases ever return
over 1000 rows. I'm worried about being able to handle the times when there
will be spikes in the traffic.

The configuration that is going on in my head is:
RAID 1, 200gig
1 server, 4g ram
Linux 2.6

I was also wondering about storage units (IBM FAStT200) with giga-bit
Ethernet to rack mount computer(s)... But would I need more than 1 CPU? If I
did, how would I handle the file system? We only do a few joins, so I think
most of it would be I/O latency.

Thanks!


Jason Hihn
Paytime Payroll