Web application startup - recommendations?

Question

Hi,
If you were to start a hosted web application business (on a quite low budget), what would be your database setup?
Some requirements:
- suports up to 10.000 concurrent users
- there are not really very much transactions, more reads and quite heavy analytics (using materialized views)
- 24/7 is not required, but of course, there should be as little down time as possible
- there won't be very much data (err, no, I haven't done my homework yet), except attachments, which are most probably unpredictable anyway
I was thinking about just one server (I know, I know, ...), prefferably virtualized so it's possible to migrate to another server in case of hardware failure.
Base hw:
something 64 bit, probably at least 32 GB ram
1 Proc with as many cores as possible, so we can license just one socket (but should be expandable to 2)
Oracle / vmware virtualization? Should disk access be native or virtualized (I don't know Oracle vm, but vmware does support that)?
Disks:
probably very fast, right?
raid: hw or sw? mirror, 5?
Attachments should probaby get theri own (slower but bigger) raid. Maybe raid 5?
I think a pair of fast disks (scsi?) in raid 1 should be good enough for most tables...
Should materialized views get their own raid?
I know this is all very loose, but at this time it's all i know.
Thanks for any ideas.

Answer 1

Jernej Kase wrote:
1 Proc with as many cores as possible, so we can license just one socket (but should be expandable to 2)That's not how Oracle counts CPUs:
"The number of required licenses shall be determined by multiplying the total
number of cores of the processor by a core processor licensing factor specified on
the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table which can be accessed at
http://oracle.com/contracts."
http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/sig.pdf