Best hardware

Hi there,

And sorry for bringing this up again, but I couldn't find any recent
discussion on the best hardware, and I know it actually depends on what you
are doing...

So this is what I had in mind:

Our database is going to consist of about 100 tables or so of which only a
hand full will be really big, say in the 100 of million rows, fully indexed
and we are going to add a lot of entries (n* 100 000, n<100) on a daily
bases (24/5). So from my experience with MySql I know that it is somewhat
hard on the I/O, and that the speed of the head of the HD is actually
limitiing. Also, I only experimented with RAID5, and heard that RAID10 will
be good for reading but not writing.

So I wanted to go whith RAIDKing. They have a 16 bay Raid box that they fill
with Raptors (10krpm,73 GB, SATA), connected via FC. Now I am not sure what
server would be good or if I should go with redundant servers. Are Quad CPUs
any good? I heard that the IBM quad system is supposed to be 40% faster than
HP or Dell???. And how much RAM should go for: are 8GB enough? Oh, of course
I wanted to run it under RedHat...

I would appreciate any sugestions and comments or if you are too bored with
this topic, just send me a link where I can read up on this....

Thanks a lot for your kind replies.

Bernd

Bernd Jagla, PhD
Associate Research Scientist
Columbia University