To whatever extent possible, I'd like to buy a large number of general
purpose boxen that can be reasonably pressed into service for a
variety of configurations, rather than trying to overspecify what we
are going to do and buy machines that are highly specific to those
purposes.
My thinking is that we will be needing N general boxen to do load
balancing/squid/apache and then also email and dns on separate
machines too I think, and 2 specialized boxes to be database servers.
We have one very good machine (when it's fixed!) to be our database
server. We will want another one that's not quite as expensive but
which would be reasonably capable of serving as a backup unit. If the
general profile that we are buying is capable of doing that, then
great. If not, then at least one machine is going to have to be
special.
Does that sound sensible?
--Jimbo