Need a server under a budget of $15,000

Hi

You have a large budget. I strongly recommend you buy a server from major supplier (Dell, HP etc) rather than build it your self.
Get a 3 or 5 year on site hardware warrantee, a major brand UPS, suitable server room location with air conditioning (unless in a cold climate)

What sort of backup hardware is used on the current server ? do you need backward compatibility ?

With that size budget you can get massive RAID 5 Hard Disk, (with optional hot swap disks with a hot spare)
possibly mirrored using fibre optic cable.

Without knowing what the current specifications are and the applications that are being supported no one can give you detailed advice

A consultant or competent IT technician can find out the reason for the current server slowing down possibly due to:-
server problems
----------------
hard disks filling up,
memory failing & automatically being disabled
extra work load is being requested,
lot of extra internet traffic hitting your website,
rogue software eating CPU cycles

faulty switch

Get a consultant from a main dealer to spec new server for you.
Do you need Virtual servers ?
Are you using Windows server or Linux server ??

regards

Mike Barnes

we do have some faulty switches...it is a very old server about 7 years old so don't assume anything current is on it. There is a scheduling application that is running on it. We also do a lot of sql queries. We also do alot of Microsoft office stuff especially with exel. We don't do any video rendering or anything of that sorts. We keep track of patients, employees, schedules, billing, and some other stuff. The server we have is handling it, but it does get some hiccups and its been happening more frequently then what we would like it.

What i'm more interested in is what kind of processors should i get

Also how much ram?

I am considering of buying it from dell or some other major place and not build it myself (i never built a server only regular and gaming comps).

How much ram is going to depend on the applications you are running, but for your budget i don't see that being a limiting factor, ditto with the cpu's. you've got a choice of amd opterons or intel xeons.

I would expect that a decent supplier would help you to specify it for that kind of spend. So call them, talk to them, find out what they need to know, stress the data reliability, they may suggest separating processing and data, but that might be overkill for 20 users depending on what they are doing.