Re: most bang for buck with ~ $20,000

With such a budget you should easily be able to get something like:
- A 1U high-performance server (for instance the Dell 1950 with 2x
Woodcrest 5160, 16GB of FB-Dimm memory, one 5i and one 5e perc raid
controller and some disks internally)
- An external SAS direct attached disks storage enclosure full with 15k
rpm 36GB disks (for instance the MD1000, with 15x 36GB 15k disks)

Going for the dell-solution would set you back "only" (including
savings) about $13-$14k. HP offers a similar solutions (a HP DL360G5 or
a DL380G5/DL385 with two MSA50's for instance) which also fit in your
budget afaik. The other players tend to be (a bit) more expensive, force
you to go with Fibre Channel or "ancient" SCSI external storage ;)

If you'd like to have a product by a generic vendor, have a look at the
Adaptec JS50 SAS Jbod enclosure or Promise's Vtrak 300 (both offer 12
sas/sata bays in 2U) for storage.

If you're limited to only 2U of rack space, its a bit more difficult to
get maximum I/O in your budget (you have basically space for about 8 or
12 3.5" disks (with generic suppliers) or 16 2.5" sff disks (with HP)).
But you should still be able to have two top-off-the-line x86 cpu's (amd
opteron 285 or intel woorcrest 5160) and 16GB of memory (even FB Dimm,
which is pretty expensive).

Best regards,

Arjen van der Meijden

On 8-8-2006 22:43, Kenji Morishige wrote:
> I've asked for some help here a few months ago and got some really helpfull
> answers regarding RAID controllers and server configuration. Up until
> recently I've been running PostgreSQL on a two year old Dual Xeon 3.06Ghz
> machine with a single channel RAID controller (previously Adaptec 2200S, but
> now changed to LSI MegaRAID). The 2U unit is from a generic vendor using what
> I believe is a SuperMicro motherboard. In the last week after upgrading the
> RAID controller, the machine has had disk failure and some other issues. I
> would like to build a very reliable dedicated postgreSQL server that has the
> ultimate possible performance and reliabily for around $20,000. The data set
> size is only currently about 4GB, but is increasing by approximately 50MB
> daily. The server also requires about 500 connections and I have been
> monitoring about 100-200 queries per second at the moment. I am planning to
> run FreeBSD 6.1 if possible, but I am open to any other suggestions if it
> improves performance.
>
> I am considering a setup such as this:
> - At least dual cpu (possibly with 2 cores each)
> - 4GB of RAM
> - 2 disk RAID 1 array for root disk
> - 4 disk RAID 1+0 array for PGDATA
> - 2 disk RAID 1 array for pg_xlog
>
> Does anyone know a vendor that might be able provide such setup? Any
> critique in this design? I'm thinking having a 2 channel RAID controller to
> seperate the PGDATA, root and pg_xlog.
>
> Sincerely,
> Kenji
>
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