Re: Hardware advice for scalable warehouse db

Hi Chris,

A couple comments on the NetApp SAN.
We use NetApp, primarily with Fiber connectivity and FC drives. All of the
Postgres files are located on the SAN and this configuration works well.
We have tried iSCSI, but performance his horrible. Same with SATA drives.
The SAN will definitely be more costly then local drives. It really depends
on what your needs are.
The biggest benefit for me in using SAN is using the special features that
it offers. We use snapshots and flex clones, which is a great way to backup
and clone large databases.

Cheers,
Terry

On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 11:34 PM, chris <chricki(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:

> Hi list,
>
> My employer will be donated a NetApp FAS 3040 SAN [1] and we want to run
> our warehouse DB on it. The pg9.0 DB currently comprises ~1.5TB of
> tables, 200GB of indexes, and grows ~5%/month. The DB is not update
> critical, but undergoes larger read and insert operations frequently.
>
> My employer is a university with little funds and we have to find a
> cheap way to scale for the next 3 years, so the SAN seems a good chance
> to us. We are now looking for the remaining server parts to maximize DB
> performance with costs <= $4000. I digged out the following
> configuration with the discount we receive from Dell:
>
> 1 x Intel Xeon X5670, 6C, 2.93GHz, 12M Cache
> 16 GB (4x4GB) Low Volt DDR3 1066Mhz
> PERC H700 SAS RAID controller
> 4 x 300 GB 10k SAS 6Gbps 2.5" in RAID 10
>
> I was thinking to put the WAL and the indexes on the local disks, and
> the rest on the SAN. If funds allow, we might downgrade the disks to
> SATA and add a 50 GB SATA SSD for the WAL (SAS/SATA mixup not possible).
>
> Any comments on the configuration? Any experiences with iSCSI vs. Fibre
> Channel for SANs and PostgreSQL? If the SAN setup sucks, do you see a
> cheap alternative how to connect as many as 16 x 2TB disks as DAS?
>
> Thanks so much!
>
> Best,
> Chris
>
> [1]: http://www.b2net.co.uk/netapp/fas3000.pdf
>
>
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