I'm new so opensolaris and very new to ZFS. In the past we have always used linux for our database backends.
So now we are looking for a new database server to give us a big performance boost, and also the possibility for scalability. Our current database consists mainly of a huge table containing about 230 million records and a few (relatively) smaller tables (something like 13 million records ans less). The main table is growing with about 800k records every day, and the prognosis is that this number will increase significantly in the near future. All of this is currently held in a Postgresql database with the largest tables divided into segments to speed up performance. This all runs on a linux machine with 4 GB of RAM and 4 10K SCSI disks in HW raid 10. The complete database is about 70 Gb in size, and growing every day. We will soon need hew hardware, and are also reviewing software needs. Besides a lot more RAM (16 or 32GB), the new machine will also get a much lager disk array. We don't need the size, but we do need the IO it can generate. And what we also need is it beeing able to scale. When needs grow, it should be possible to add more disks to be able to handle the extra IO. And that is exactly where ZFS comes in, at least as far as I read. The question is: how can we maximize IO by using the best possible combination of hardware and ZFS RAID? I'll probably be having 16 Seagate 15K5 SAS disks, 150 GB each. Two in HW raid1 for the OS, two in HW raid 1 or 10 for the transaction log. The OS does not need to be on ZFS, but could be. So that leaves 10 or 12 disks to configure for the database. The question is how to divide them to get the best IO performance by mixing the best of both worlds. For what I read, mirroring and striping should get me better performance than raidz of RAID5. But I guess you might give me some pointer on how to distribute the disk. My biggest question is what I should leave to the HW raid, and what to ZFS? This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
