Re: IBM P-series machines (was: Excessive context

On Mon, 2004-10-11 at 13:38, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 05, 2004 at 09:47:36AM -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> > As long as you're on x86, scaling outward is the way to go. If you want to
> > continue to scale upwards, ask Andrew Sullivan about his experiences running
> > PostgreSQL on big IBM boxes. But if you consider an quad-Opteron server
> > expensive, I don't think that's an option for you.

> The 650s are not cheap, but boy are they fast. I don't have any
> numbers I can share, but I can tell you that we recently had a few
> days in which our write load was as large as the entire write load
> for last year, and you couldn't tell. It is too early for us to say
> whether the P series lives up to its billing in terms of relibility:
> the real reason we use these machines is reliability, so if
> approaching 100% uptime isn't important to you, the speed may not be
> worth it.

Agreed completely, and the 570 knocks the 650 out of the water -- nearly
double the performance for math heavy queries. Beware vendor support for
Linux on these things though -- we ran into many of the same issues with
vendor support on the IBM machines as we did with the Opterons.