Re: Tyan Thunder MB for postgres server

Iain wrote:

> Thanks to all for your feedback on this.
>
> I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the system.
>
> It seems that the battery backed cache is an important factor, though I
> havn't found any information specifically concerning this on the tyan
> site. I can't tell if it's an option or standard with the integrated
> SCSI controller.

RAID may be an option with your motherboard. LSI Logic has a MegaRAID
320-0 which interfaces with integrated MB SCSI.

http://www.lsilogic.com/products/megaraid/scsi_320_0.html

They don't list any Tyan's as "certified" so I dunno. Perhaps you should
look into a Tyan w/o integrated SCSI and just get the MegaRAID 320-1 or
320-2 to avoid any possible issues.

> I don't have much experience with building this kind of server (i'm more
> on the development side) but I know basically what I want and that is
> RAID 0+1 and battery backed cache. The target OS is RHEL ES 3 (AMD64
> platform) and I guess that it doesn't matter if the RAID is hardware or
> software (or a combination of both?) but if you think I've missed
> anything, please let me know.

Hardware RAID + battery lets you turn write caching on. For a DB with
lots of updates, it can make a big difference.