R help - Sep 2009 - On what (shared) machine will R perform faster?

Dear R-ers,

need your advice on hardware (beware - I am not knowledgeable about that).

I find R runs wonderfully on laptops. In my company, we decided to get
some kind of a powerful computer (server?) so that we could run big
jobs on it (e.g., in R, SAS, SPSS, Excel). We were thinking of
something more powerful than a simple additional laptop or desktop,
but something with superior computing power - something everyone could
log into remotely, and something that several people could work on
simultaneously.

Our IT has given us what they call a "virtual server", but it runs
more slowly than my laptop - I checked!

Any advice on what we should be looking for? What should that be? What
technical characteristics should it have?
And should we then just install the regular R on it or something else?



Thank you very much for your advice!


-- 
Dimitri Liakhovitski
Ninah.com
Dimitri.Liakhovitski at ninah.com