Bill, While I generally agree with you regarding SCSI when it comes to datbase servers, I would disagree in regard to web servers. We have multiple CF web servers in a cluster. the "file access" mostly hits the template cache. Once they are booted the disks do relatively little other than system tasks - assuming you have adequate memory and your template cache is large enough. We baselined it very carefully and came to the conclusion that for THIS specicific purpose, IDE was sufficient. The number concurrent users seems to make no appreciable impact (we serve as many as 5 million requests on a typical business day) on the performance of the disk. The chief factor in the decision should be the amount of disk activity. Note, since they are NOT hot swappable, I would not try this arrangement outside of a cluster as it would result in down-time. We use Raid 1 for redundacy and keep spares handy - but we have needed them no more frequently than the scsi spares.
As far as the enterprise goes - buy the best hardware you can afford for your Datbase server, have hot spares on board and a good backup db server (that you keep current with log shipping or replication or whatever). That's where the critical data lives. IMO, I'd rather have a cluster of 4 inexpensive web servers running through a hardward load balancer than 1 expensive web server. -Mark -----Original Message----- From: Bill Wheatley [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, July 15, 2002 8:48 AM To: CF-Talk Subject: Re: The drive wars - was hardware question. Bah IDE just doesn't function as well when you have concurrent users doing things on the drive. IDE ATA100 is nice for when its just me or a few people banging out stuff on the drives. But if you have a good load of processes having to read and write to the drive you need to have SCSI. I have ATA133 at home it rocks but we also have 15k SCSI drives at work and I couldn't even think to put our stuff on IDE drives. IDE is not their yet for enterprise level business, it will work but its like towing a boat with a Economy class ford escort. :) But then again what do I know. Bill Wheatley Senior Database Developer Macromedia Certified Advanced Coldfusion Developer EDIETS.COM 954.360.9022 X159 ICQ 417645 ----- Original Message ----- From: "Mark A. Kruger - CFG" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "CF-Talk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, July 15, 2002 8:30 AM Subject: RE: The drive wars - was hardware question. > We have both IDE and SCSI (some are hot swap and some are no) in a large > data center with many different kinds of systems. We see BOTH kinds of > drives fail infrequently. IMO, if you have a server without a hot backup > server, or one that's not in a cluster, using a hot-swappable SCSI setup is > something you should seriously consider - especially for a DB server. > However, we use IDE quite successfully in several situations. > > -mk > > > > ______________________________________________________________________ Structure your ColdFusion code with Fusebox. Get the official book at http://www.fusionauthority.com/bkinfo.cfm FAQ: http://www.thenetprofits.co.uk/coldfusion/faq Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/index.cfm?sidebar=lists
