[SAC] Virtualization hardware specifications

[Howard Butler]

If someone has the time, interest, and is confident enough about  
hardware wankery, we need some specs and costs on a three well- 
appointed servers to replace osgeo1, osgeo2, and a few blades.  Assume  
we would be wanting to run Xen (or something like it) for a number of  
server instances on each machine (more cores and more RAM, the  
better).  Assume we're running at OSL, 2U's would probably be fine,  
and at least one of the machines should have enough hd to run our trac/ 
drupal postgresql/mysql databases.

How much can we get for $20k USD?  Being the lazy and rather  
uneducated person that I am, I would head over to Dell's site and see  
what a tricked out dual-proc Nehalem with 8+ gb of RAM would be and  
multiply x 3, but I would suspect we could do better than that.   
Alternatively, should we just outsource the hardware procurement to  
OSL entirely, or is having our own physical hardware something we  
really want?

osgeo1 and osgeo2 on peer1 is not our hosting future, and we are  
continually getting requests for more and more services.  Unless  
someone has a better idea, I propose we start looking seriously at OSL  
for our hosting home and decide if we want to be having our own  
hardware or be completely virtual.  Let's try to have all of the bits  
in place by the New York sprint (February or March) so we can  
piggyback our buildout, development, and deployment with that event.   
Sound like a plan?

Howard