Re: SAN vs Internal Disks

On Thu, 6 Sep 2007, Harsh Azad wrote:

> Firstly, I could only find postgres 8.1.x RPM for CentOS 5, could not find
> any RPM for 8.2.4. Is there any 8.2.4 RPM for CentOS 5?

You've already been pointed in the right direction. Devrim, the person who
handles this packaging, does a great job of building all the RPMs. But I
have a small philisophical difference with the suggested instructions for
actually installing them though. I just finished an alternate
installation guide for RHEL/CentOS 5 that's now posted at
http://www.westnet.com/~gsmith/content/postgresql/pgrpm.htm you may want
to take a look at.

> Secondly, would investing into Redhat enterprise edition give any
> performance advantage? I know all the SAN boxes are only certified on
> RHEL and not CentOS. Or since CentOS is similar to RHEL it would be
> fine?

Wouldn't expect a performance advantage. The situation you have to ask
consider is this: your SAN starts having funky problems, and your
database is down because of it. You call the vendor. They find out
you're running CentOS instead of RHEL and say that's the cause of your
problem (even though it probably isn't). How much will such a passing the
buck problem cost your company? If it's a significant number, you'd be
foolish to run CentOS instead of the real RHEL. Some SAN vendors can be
very, very picky about what they will support, and for most business
environments the RHEL subscription isn't so expensive that it's worth
wandering into an area where your support situation is fuzzy just to save
that money.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD