Zee I agree with "extremely happy with e-smith 4.1.2 ", it does what it's supposed to very well. Nice piece of sw - hats' off to their crew.
The idea that you need a new server with more flash seems premature. Unless you want to upgrade to the k7 for the experience it's more likely one of your designers could use that system. You've made it clear you've put alot of work into custoimzation and that your pleased with the results. The hw is as much a part of you satisfaction as is the e-mith sw and the tweaks you've added. With only 20 people I'm almost positive, that is - sure enough to bet big change, that you could get exactly the results your looking for with minimal changes to the system. This keeps the parts of the equation intact. Fewer changes you make means the less likely your gonna go from "extremely happy" to frustrated and angry. Not to mention losing money. The point I've tried to so wordily make is that the question needs more consideration before it can be answered. Enough with the rant, let's get technical.
Are you sure the problem really is the server? There's not a misconfiguration somehwere and a box is flooding your network w/ broadcast storms. Just an example. I'd check because your sever sounds qualified, overly even, for a 20 user load.
If it is the server the first thing to do is find the bottleneck with the current machine. If you can't or can't minimize it with a reasonable solution then it's time to look for a new box. It would be helpful if you could describe what the machine actually does and under what kind of load. I've seen lesser machines serve 4 times the users you've got, on top of NT! A little linux system, p166 w/ 32 megs, easily handles email for 70+ people, this is at a publishing company w/ alot of large attachments passing through plus webmail interface. But neither of these is simultaneously pushing a high volume website - maybe your server is. More details are definitely necessary. Generally the hd(s) is/are the weakest link in a production machine. With ram being so cheap there's no reason not to plugin the max the board can support. That leaves cpu and network and with 20 users it's unlikey either is causing the slowdown. See what you can upgrade as far as drives and interfaces. Storagereview.com has great hd reviews(imagine that!) The only reason to use any type of raid solution would be for the redundancy mirroring would provide in event of a hd failure. To a certain degree all raid is sw raid, either way the cpu hit is negligible. Almost certainly your running an ide drive off the mobo controller. With a p450 it might be udma/33. So think of getting a seperate controller udma/66 controller card if you don't mirror then consider setting up the system on one drive and storing data on another. Newer ide drives are much better performers versus their parents. And keep them on their own channels. Likely that 450 is running a bx chipset which to this day is considered the best one Intel has ever produced. No reason to give up that stability for the newer, unmature AMD 760mp chipset on the 1st gen tyan board. If you do need more cpu brawn consider using another box to divide tasks between - might even be able to use an old one lying around. Could also have a security benefit if you can isolate public and private resources. At this point I would not consider a AMD dually in a production situation - at home, hell yeah! So the question is: what's does this machine need to do and how much of "this" will it be processing.
You mentioned a bp6 in your other post. If your problem was with the highpoint controller, the secondary udma ports - the white ones, that has been well documented. I just removed it from my board and bought a controller card. That board would make a nice database box as your second server. Had to mention it, I'm fond of that bp6.
Feel free to shoot me a email about this.
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