Thread: Re: Spend 7K *WHERE*? WAS Intel SRCS16 SATA raid? and How

Re: Spend 7K *WHERE*? WAS Intel SRCS16 SATA raid? and How

From
"Matthew Nuzum"
Date:
I think there are many people who feel that $7,000 is a good budget for a
database server, me being one.

 * I agree with the threads that more disks are better.
 * I also agree that SCSI is better, but can be hard to justify if your
budget is tight, and I have great certainty that 2x SATA drives on a good
controller is better than x SCSI drives for many work loads.
 * I also feel that good database design and proper maintenance can be one
of the single biggest performance enhancers available. This can be labor
intensive, however, and sometimes throwing more hardware at a problem is
cheaper than restructuring a db.

Either way, having a good hardware platform is an excellent place to start,
as much of your tuning will depend on certain aspects of your hardware.

So if you need a db server, and you have $7k to spend, I'd say spend it.
From this list, I've gathered that I/O and RAM are your two most important
investments.

Once you get that figured out, you can still do some performance tuning on
your new server using the excellent advice from this mailing list.

By the way, for all those who make this list work, I've rarely found such a
thorough, helpful and considerate group of people as these on the
performance list.

--
Matthew Nuzum <matt@followers.net>
www.followers.net - Makers of "Elite Content Management System"
View samples of Elite CMS in action by visiting
http://www.followers.net/portfolio/




Re: Spend 7K *WHERE*? WAS Intel SRCS16 SATA raid? and How

From
Rod Taylor
Date:
On Fri, 2005-04-15 at 15:43 -0500, Matthew Nuzum wrote:
> I think there are many people who feel that $7,000 is a good budget for a
> database server, me being one.

The budget for a database server is usually some %age of the value of
the data within the database or the value of it's availability. Big
budget hardware (well, going from $7k to $100k) often brings more
redundancy and reliability improvement than performance improvement.

If you're going to lose $100k in business because the database was
unavailable for 12 hours, then kick $75k into the hardware and call a
profit of $25k over 3 years (hardware lifetime is 3 years, catastrophic
failure happens once every 3 or so years...).

Ditto for backup systems. If the company depends on the data in the
database for it's survival, where bankruptcy or worse would happen as a
result of complete dataloss, then it would be a good idea to invest a
significant amount of the companies revenue into making damn sure that
doesn't happen. Call it an insurance policy.


Performance for me dictates which hardware is purchased and
configuration is used within $BUDGET, but $BUDGET itself is nearly
always defined by the value of the data stored.


>  * I agree with the threads that more disks are better.
>  * I also agree that SCSI is better, but can be hard to justify if your
> budget is tight, and I have great certainty that 2x SATA drives on a good
> controller is better than x SCSI drives for many work loads.
>  * I also feel that good database design and proper maintenance can be one
> of the single biggest performance enhancers available. This can be labor
> intensive, however, and sometimes throwing more hardware at a problem is
> cheaper than restructuring a db.
>
> Either way, having a good hardware platform is an excellent place to start,
> as much of your tuning will depend on certain aspects of your hardware.
>
> So if you need a db server, and you have $7k to spend, I'd say spend it.
> >From this list, I've gathered that I/O and RAM are your two most important
> investments.
>
> Once you get that figured out, you can still do some performance tuning on
> your new server using the excellent advice from this mailing list.
>
> By the way, for all those who make this list work, I've rarely found such a
> thorough, helpful and considerate group of people as these on the
> performance list.
>
--


Re: Spend 7K *WHERE*? WAS Intel SRCS16 SATA raid? and How

From
Ron Mayer
Date:
Rod Taylor wrote:
 > On Fri, 2005-04-15 at 15:43 -0500, Matthew Nuzum wrote:
 >> * I agree with the threads that more disks are better.
 >> * I also agree that SCSI is better, but can be hard to justify

Here's another approach to spend $7000 that we're currently
trying.... but it'll only work for certain systems if you can
use load balancing and/or application level partitioning
of your software.

For $859 you can buy
     a Dell SC1425 with  (*see footnote)
     2 Xeon 2.8GHz processors  (*see footnote)
     1 GB ram
     1 80GB hard drive. (*see footnote)

Doing the math, it seems I could get 8 of
these systems for that $6870, giving me:
    16  Xeon processors (*see footnote),
    640 GB of disk space spread over 8 spindles
    8   GB of ram
    16  1Gbps network adapters.


Despite the non-optimal hardware (* see footnote), the price
of each system and extra redundancy may make up the difference
for some applications.

For example, I didn't see many other $7000 proposals have
have nearly 10GB of ram, or over a dozen CPUs (even counting
the raid controllers), or over a half a terrabyte of storage ,
or capable of 5-10 Gbit/sec of network traffic...  The extra
capacity would allow me to have redundancy that would somewhat
make up for the flakier hardware, no raid, etc.

Thoughts?  Over the next couple months I'll be evaluating
a cluster of 4 systems almost exactly as I described (but
with cheaper dual hard drives in each system), for a GIS
system that does lend itself well to application-level
partitioning.

     Ron

(* footnotes)
  Yeah, I know some reports here say that dual Xeons can suck;
  but Dell's throwing in the second one for free.
  Yeah, I know some reports here say Dells can suck, but it
  was easy to get a price quote online, and they're a nice
  business partner of ours.
  Yeah, I should get 2 hard drives in each system, but Dell
  wanting an additional $160 for a 80GB hard drive is not a good deal.
  Yeah, I know I'd be better off with 2GB ram, but Dell
  wants $400 (half the price of an entire additional
  system) for the upgrade from 1GB to 2.

  I also realize that application level partitioning needed
  to take advantage of a loose cluster like this is not practical
  for many applications.

Re: Spend 7K *WHERE*? WAS Intel SRCS16 SATA raid? and How

From
Vivek Khera
Date:
On Apr 15, 2005, at 8:10 PM, Ron Mayer wrote:

> For example, I didn't see many other $7000 proposals have
> have nearly 10GB of ram, or over a dozen CPUs (even counting
> the raid controllers), or over a half a terrabyte of storage ,
> or capable of 5-10 Gbit/sec of network traffic...  The extra

And how much are you spending on the switch that will carry 10Gb/sec
traffic?

> capacity would allow me to have redundancy that would somewhat
> make up for the flakier hardware, no raid, etc.

it would work for some class of applications which are pretty much
read-only.  and don't forget to factor in the overhead of the
replication...

>
> Thoughts?  Over the next couple months I'll be evaluating
> a cluster of 4 systems almost exactly as I described (but
> with cheaper dual hard drives in each system), for a GIS
> system that does lend itself well to application-level
> partitioning.

I'd go with fewer bigger boxes with RAID so i can sleep better at night
:-)


Vivek Khera, Ph.D.
+1-301-869-4449 x806


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