Re: Postgresql Hardware

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 12:35 PM, Chris Barnes
<compuguruchrisbarnes(at)hotmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
>
> Purchase solid equipment and fairly current machines.
> We buy referbished system at a fraction of the cost of new.
>
> For example;
> IBM 3650 with 8 x 300g SAS drives and controller, 4 slot dual with the
> following specs. 16 gb memory.
> model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           E5345  @ 2.33GHz
> cache size      : 4096 KB
>
> This will probably cost ~  between $5000 & $8000

I can get that new with a 5 year warranty for about $7000 from
Aberdeen. That's with a $1,000 RAID controller thrown in the mix.
dual QC opties or xeons.

> Set the drives up raid 1 and 5 for os/logs and data and global
> hotspare. Some prefer raid 10 if you have lots of drives.

Never RAID-5. never. A big single RAID-10 on a good battery backed
caching controller will stomp any combination with RAID-5 into the
ground. On a machine with

Note that on an 8 drive machine, I make one big RAID-10 out of 6 for
everything, and have 2 hot spares for redundancy. That gives 900G
total to play around with if you have 300G SAS drives.

For about $8000 more you can get a 16 drive machine with 146G drives
and same basic setup, which I would recommend over the 8 drive
machine. With 2 hot spares, and 2 in a mirror for the OS/xlog you
still have 12 drives for a RAID-10 of nothing but the db, and that
makes a huge difference.