Re^2: OT: What Hardware is important for large I/O bound processes

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!

Comment on Re^2: OT: What Hardware is important for large I/O bound processes

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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]

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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]