My two cents---

$5K won't buy everything you need, but it will get you started.  I think at least a 4-core machine with 16GB of RAM should be sufficient for most jobs.  If you know you need more, get more RAM.

Galaxy is a hog on disk space, so try to maximize disk space.  I would set up 2 small disks (or partitions), say 20G, as RAID1 for the OS, and the remaining disks, at least 1-2TB, for Galaxy data as RAID0.

I think that configuration will quickly eat your $5K, but will give you something to work with. If you still have money to spare, increase CPUs, RAM, and disks where you can.

Oh - One power supply, 1 NIC card, etc, no redundancy...save some money...

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 4:01 PM, Stephen Turner <vustephen@gmail.com> wrote:
The tl;dr short story - I've come across about $5,000 I can use to
build a machine, and this money has to be spent by Friday. I'd like
some help spec'ing out a machine that can be used as a small-scale
production Galaxy server for internal use by a handful of folks.

Would anyone be willing to talk with me tomorrow morning, Thursday May
3, and tell me about your experience setting up a Galaxy installation
on a scale like this? With about $5k to spend, what kind of hardware
should I prioritize? I'd also like to get a sense of how much admin
time is required to keep things running smoothly, updated, backed up,
etc.

I've had a difficult time getting ITS to help me get Galaxy running on
the university's cluster. This will hopefully be a proof of principal
that people here want this - hopefully I can get enough people here
using this small-scale installation that the university ITS realizes
the demand and has more motivation to get things working on the
cluster.

Many thanks,

Stephen

-----------------------------------------
Stephen D. Turner, Ph.D.
Bioinformatics Core Director
University of Virginia School of Medicine
bioinformatics.virginia.edu
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