On a hourly basis 13 tables with number of columns between 50 to 70 columns are updated with 170 rows. The tables have a text and timestamps column with other columns being real.
I welcome your advice on choosing between these systems
those are both obsolete systems several generations old. The HP DL stuff is g7 or g8 now, not g4. that sunfire is newer, but doesn't have much ram, at least by modern database server standards.
your system description didn't include the all important performance requirements. "the database will be update on a hourly basis." ... does that mean 1 row is updated every hour? some sized batch of new data is inserted? or the whole database is wiped and rebuilt? or what? most of my databases are undergoing constant updates/inserts of new data on a steady basis, so we measure things in terms of transactions/second, with an understanding of the approximate size of each transaction.
the CPUs in that DL380G4 are late Pentium-4 class, they are the dual core version of the rather slow 'netburst' architecture. in particular these weren't all that fast at most floating point type operations.
the E5450, is from the Core 2 Quad generation, so its quite a bit better than the P4's, but still way behind the Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge stuff
-- john r pierce 37N 122W somewhere on the middle of the left coast