Re: Hardware for a database server

Yo Scott, Greg & William!

I tried to send the following message last week, but my posting never
got here. Guess my provider has fucked up. So here goes again, sorry
for late reply.

For knowledgeable feedback I have asked, and that's what I have got.
Thanx a lot. My thanks also Jim Wilson who added some very good points
in c.d.p.general.

Taken all into account, it has made me change my plans concerning CPU &
RAM: Dual-CPU (not single) with  2 GB of RAM (not 4) seems to be the
better solution to start with.

I will go for the slowest Opterons (2 x Opteron 240), which will serve
both performance & cost efficiency. They'll get 4 x 512 MB DDR SDRAM,
PC333 most likely, which should suffice for quite some time. That takes
the 2GB limit for 32bit OS into account and leaves room for upgrade to
4 GB later when i switch to AMD64 Linux (if more RAM should be needed
at all)..

Only the storage gives me a hard time. I got a lot of input from you
all. Finally I decided to go for a simple SATA RAID 1 for the time
being. Two of the new Western Digital Western Digital Raptor HDDs (10k
SATA) might suffice after all.
If that should turn out to be a bottleneck, i will add an SCSI RAID 5
system, while the OS stays on one of the SATA drives. The mainboard
TYAN Thunder K8S Pro provides a PCI X slot ready for a SCSI controller
card.

My sympathy for postgresql has prooved right once more. You gave me
very profound advice. Thanx a lot!


Best Regards
Erwin Brandstetter