Help Selecting CRM Server

[Sawa]

Hello,

I was wondering if someone here might be willing to help me select a server (or servers) capable of supporting a Help Desk CRM package used by 16 Administrators and up to 2000 potential end-users. (the users are able to open up a page and submit service requests, or browse a knowledgebase)

The CRM package in question is called SysAid, and it uses a web-based UI. It will be running on a Linux server with a MySQL database.
http://www.ilient.com/system-requirements.htm

This is actually part of a school project that requires us to research and plan-out the creation of a new Help Desk for a telemarketing company with 3300+ employees. Everything has gone great so far, but when it came time to start selecting hardware, I realized that I knew very little about servers, server hardware, and server requirements.

While cost is definitely a factor, I don't specifically need the best price, best deal, or most fully-featured. I really just need some type of ballpark recommendation -- either for specific hardware, or for the actual hardware requirements to go searching for. An adequate Dell server would more than fulfill my needs.

Any advice, comments, or additional resources would be greatly appreciated.

 

[engiNURD]

Requirements look rather low, so just calculate the disk space you need and go with a newer gen CPU with at least 4GB of RAM and you should be fine. It lists a P4 or equiv, and basically any dual core Intel Core-based CPU at 1.8Ghz would be on par with the highest P4, and simply raise that speed by about 400Mhz for an AMD PhenomII based CPU. You could probably find a pre-built HP or Dell that would do the job for under $500.

 

[keenan]

It really depends on how much load the software puts on the database, assuming that's where the majority of the load comes from (and for web apps it usually is). Only the company that makes the software (or some admin familiar with it) is going to be able to give you an accurate estimate of how much hardware you're going to need to support 2000 active users. I definitely don't think a $500 server is going to cut it, you're probably going to need a dedicated database server with a fast disk array and lots of memory and a smaller and simpler application server. It really comes down to the application though, you could easily support 2000 users on a single server if the database load is light, but I expect that especially in a telemarketing company the load could be fairly significant.

Bottom line - you need to ask this question to someone who knows the application and your industry. A well-tuned and aggressively cached app that does few queries might be fine with that load on a cheap server, but IME most apps such as this one are neither well tuned nor aggressively cached, and tend to do plenty of queries.

My uneducated guess is that you're going to want a dedicated database server with lots of memory (and possibly a fast disk array, depending on the write load and size of the DB) and a separate app server.