Re: OT: What Hardware is important for large I/O bound processes

Databases are very I/O intensive. 350 GB is really small by today hard-drive standards (there are 250 and 400GB drives available). A NAS (Network attached storage) would certainly perform badly, unless you use a very high end one (NetApp FAS900).

If your need is only :"moderate storage capacity, extreme I/O power, security", I'd go for a fibre-channel enclosure with FC or SCSI drives (NOT SATA drives, like the low-end SANs propose!) and I'll configure it as a RAID-10 for high-performance and security. For instance 6x150GB 15000RPMs drives will be fine and very (very very) fast, and expandable.

Be very careful, most vendors today propose low-end FC-to-SATA RAID enclosures (like Apple X-Serve RAID, that Oracle's buying by truckloads), they're really great for file storage but not that great for database if you don't fill them up to throat with drives (14) and cache (2GB). But a filled-up X-Server RAID sizes 6 TB, not 350GB...

See what's the best bang-for-the-bucks. Sure an X-Serve RAID isn't much more expensive than a small FC enclosure, it's much bigger BUT far slower. However it may be enough for you (we don't know where you're starting from, perhaps are you using 5 years old disks with extra-low performance by today measures?) and will provide HUGE storage capacity.

Comment on Re: OT: What Hardware is important for large I/O bound processes

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Re^2: OT: What Hardware is important for large I/O bound processes by Anonymous Monk on Jul 28, 2005 at 18:29 UTC
Thanks for the great detailed suggestions! The 350GB is just the largest database schema. We have a few schemas; in raw diskspace have around 4-6 TBs on SANs, individual disks and a NAS (12 GB cache) but the hardware is old. From a purely I/O throughput perspective which is better? Having a single powerful database server with 8 SCSI drives? Or getting a new low-end server with PCI-X and a powerful SAN? Again thanks for the detailed tips!	[reply]
Re^3: OT: What Hardware is important for large I/O bound processes by wazoox (Prior) on Jul 28, 2005 at 21:41 UTC
Well, get the best hardware money can buy and it should be OK :) OK, from a ROI perspective, low-end servers like supermicro or Dell with a dual-Xeon, a FC or SCSI board and an external drive enclosure with FC or SCSI drives is probably "good enough" for most database works (one of my customers uses a similar machine with a 9TB database) In case you may need more storage, Apple X-Serve Raid is great but as I mentioned, be prepared to fill it if you want to do serious database work. HP, EMC and other have similar products but I didn't try them so I can't really compare.	[reply]