Re: How to improve db performance with $7K?

Steve Poe wrote:

> Situation: An 24/7 animal hospital (100 employees) runs their
> business on Centos 3.3 (RHEL 3) Postgres 7.4.2 (because they have to)
> off a 2-CPU Xeon 2.8MHz, 4GB of RAM, (3) SCSI disks RAID 0 (zcav value
> 35MB per sec). The databse is 11GB comprised over 100 tables and
> indexes from 1MB to 2GB in size.
>
> I recently told the hospital management team worst-case scenerio they
> need to get the database on its own drive array since the RAID0 is a
> disaster wating to happen. I said ideally a new dual AMD server with
> 6/7-disk configuration would be ideal for safety and performance, but
> they don't have $15K. I said a seperate drive array offer the balance
> of safety and performance.
>
> I have been given budget of $7K to accomplish a safer/faster database
> through hardware upgrades. The objective is to get a drive array, but
> I can use the budget any way I see fit to accomplish the goal.

You could build a dual opteron with 4 GB of ram, 12 10k raptor SATA
drives with a battery backed cache for about 7k or less.

Or if they are not CPU bound just IO bound you could easily just
add an external 12 drive array (even if scsi) for less than 7k.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

>
> Since I am a dba novice, I did not physically build this server, nor
> did I write the application the hospital runs on, but I have the
> opportunity to make it better, I'd thought I should seek some advice
> from those who have been down this road before. Suggestions/ideas
> anyone?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Steve Poe
>
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