At 11:21 AM 2/15/2006, Jeremy Haile wrote:
We are a small company looking to put together the most cost effective
solution for our production database environment. Currently in
production Postgres 8.1 is running on this machine:
Dell 2850
2 x 3.0 Ghz Xeon 800Mhz FSB 2MB Cache
4 GB DDR2 400 Mhz
2 x 73 GB 10K SCSI RAID 1 (for xlog and OS)
4 x 146 GB 10K SCSI RAID 10 (for postgres data)
Perc4ei controller
The above is a standard Dell box with nothing added or modified beyond
the options available directly through Dell. We had a bad processor last
week that effectively put us down for an entire weekend. Though it was
the web server that failed, the experience has caused us to step back
and spend time coming up with a more reliable/fail-safe solution that
can reduce downtime.
Our load won't be substantial so extreme performance and load balancing
are not huge concerns. We are looking for good performance, at a good
price, configured in the most redundant, high availability manner
possible. Availability is the biggest priority.
I sent our scenario to our sales team at Dell and they came back with
all manner of SAN, DAS, and configuration costing as much as $50k.
We have the budget to purchase 2-3 additional machines along the lines
of the one listed above. As a startup with a limited budget, what would
this list suggest as options for clustering/replication or setting our
database up well in general?
1= Tell Dell "Thanks but no thanks." and do not buy any more
equipment from them. Their value per $$ is less than other options
available to you.
2= The current best bang for the buck HW (and in many cases, best
performing as well) for pg:
a= AMD K8 and K9 (dual core) CPUs. Particularly the A64 X2 3800+
when getting the most for your $$ matters a lot
pg gets a nice performance boost from running in 64b.
b= Decent Kx server boards are available from Gigabyte, IWill,
MSI, Supermicro, and Tyan to name a few.
IWill has a 2P 16 DIMM slot board that is particularly nice
for a server that needs lots of RAM.
c= Don't bother with SCSI or FC HD's unless you are doing the most
demanding kind of OLTP. SATA II HD's provide better value.
d= HW RAID controllers are only worth it in certain
scenarios. Using RAID 5 almost always means you should use a HW RAID
controller.
e= The only HW RAID controllers worth the $$ for you are 3ware
Escalade 9550SX's and Areca ARC-11xx or ARC-12xx's.
*For the vast majority of throughput situations, the ARC-1xxx's
with >= 1GB of battery backed WB cache are the best value*
f= 1GB RAM sticks are cheap enough and provide enough value that
you should max out any system you get with them.
g= for +high+ speed fail over, Chelsio and others are now making
PCI-X and PCI-E 10GbE NICs at reasonable prices.
The above should serve as a good "pick list" for the components of
any servers you need.
3= The most economically sound HW and SW architecture that best suits
your performance and reliability needs is context dependent to your
specific circumstances.
Where are you located?
Ron
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