It's really a matter of deciding whether you want to buy prebuilt or just build it yourself. For what it's worth, I find the former option is much better if yo

It's really a matter of deciding whether you want to buy prebuilt or just build it yourself. For what it's worth, I find the former option is much better if you intend on having a large number of similarly spec-ed servers (since the vendor will have nice management tools designed to make your life easy) and the latter option is much better if you need very specific configurations (eg; bleeding-edge hardware) or you're reasonably competent at IT and want to save $$. What's your budget? If < $4k you'll want to go dual socket. Xeon E5's are topping out at 22 cores per socket nowadays. You'll find the price sweetspot around 12 cores/socket. If > $5k you can go for the Xeon E5-4xxx series (which if you want to wait for Q2'16 are getting a slight speed bump) in the V4 models. You'll get up to 18 cores/socket but the price sweetspot is still around 12 cores/socket (gives you 96 logical threads in linux). Most decent server motherboards for these processors will support 512GB+ DDR4 ECC RAM. Again, supermicro is a good bet. Just make sure it's a server and not workstation motherboard (it should have dedicated IPMI). If you're planning on running something storage intensive, spring for a MOBO with built-in SAS adapter. Then you'll be better off dockerizing your application instead of spinning up a bunch of VM's. Why? You get easy shared access to disks, much lower overhead, you can easily use a cloud builder like quay.io, and if you want to deploy to AWS or your own server your code is guaranteed to run identically. For what it's worth, I currently run highly networking and CPU bound trading programs in a containerized environment and it's been wonderful. Much easier than VM's and much lower overhead. Plus you can mess with the networking to your heart's content (made easy by using pipework).