Thanks!<p>Initially all I &quot;need&quot; is a relatively
high end of a <i>consumer grade</i>
mid-tower case, e.g., an AMD
8 core processor, 32 GB of ECC
main memory, several hard disks,
on a current motherboard 
for less than $150 or so running
Windows Server or maybe, 
initially, just Windows 7 Pro.<p>Keep that on average half busy
24 x 7 for a month, and I will
be able to afford more.<p>If I get, say, two wire rack shelf units
18 x 48 x 72&quot;, fill them with
a good router and mid tower
cases, and keep all that 
on average half busy 24 x 7,
then I will consider
a colocation facility or the
cloud.<p>A few miles from me is
a nicely big, fully serious
colocation facility
that offers dual 10 GbE 
Internet connections, etc.<p>No joke:  One of those shelf
units has room for about 12 
mid tower cases.  Keep two
such shelf units busy, and that
will max out what I&#x27;m willing
to pursue without a lot more
<i>server farm</i> expertise than
I have (or want to get) 
and also make cash not
a problem.<p>So, one hope is that I will be
able to pay some experts, two
or three days at a time, to
hold my hand into more --
reliable electrical power,
HVAC, floor space, cabling, racks, 
servers for the racks, 
internals of the servers for
the racks, e.g., maybe Xeon,
automation for software
installation, system management,
system monitoring,
farm performance analysis,
fail-over, virtual machine 
exploitation, security,
test systems, development
systems, organized 
code repository and testing,
all relevant documentation,
training, recruiting, 
HR, legal, real estate leasing,
janitorial, physical security,
etc.  Or, right, just use
a cloud!<p>But for the high end Xeon 
processors, I&#x27;m looking
ahead.  E.g., a motherboard
with two Xeons with 18 cores each,
all in just one full tower case,
or two for failover, or
three considering testing,
might provide enough 
computing for my startup
all the way to exit so that
I could avoid taking seriously
what I&#x27;d have to do 
with 100 people 
and 50,000 square feet of
server farm, dual optical
fiber connections to an
Internet backbone point of
presence, etc.  So, that&#x27;s
why looking into high end
Xeons now is not totally
wasted time.<p>Thanks for the help!