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

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.
>
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