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

On Aug 8, 2006, at 1:43 PM, Kenji Morishige wrote:

>
>
> 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.

It's fairly similar to the system I'm using - I have 6 spindles for
PGDATA rather than 4. It's a 9550SX SATA based box with
26 bays (16 empty right now) dual Opterons and 4 gigs of
RAM. About $7k from asacomputers.com. Performance is
good, drastically better than the SCSI Dell server it replaced,
but I've not benchmarked it.

You mention 500 simultaneous connections. If that's really
500 simultaneous database connections (rather than, say,
500 simultaneous web users feeding into a pool of fewer
database connections) then that's a lot. I might go with a
bit more RAM than 4GB.

You should have a lot left over from
$20k, and spending some of it on more RAM would be a good
investment (as might a better RAID controller than the 9550SX,
some dual core CPUs and maybe some more PGDATA spindles).

Cheers,
Steve