basket, eggs & NAS (was eggs Re: Ideal Hardware?)

On Wed, 2003-10-01 at 10:13, Jason Hihn wrote:
> We have an opportunity to purchase a new, top-notch database server. I am
> wondering what kind of hardware is recommended? We're on Linux platforms and
> kernels though. I remember a comment from Tom about how he was spending a
> lot of time debugging problems which turned out to be hardware-related. I of
> course would like to avoid that.
> 
> In terms of numbers, we expect have an average of 100 active connections
> (most of which are idle 9/10ths of the time), with about 85% reading
> traffic. I expect the database with flow average 10-20kBps under moderate
> load. I hope to have one server host about 1000-2000 active databases, with
> the largest being about 60 meg (no blobs). Inactive databases will only be
> for reading (archival) purposes, and will seldom be accessed.

Whoever mentioned using multiple servers instead of one uber-server
is very right.  You're putting all your eggs in one basket that way,
and unless that "basket" has hot-swap CPUs, memory boards, etc, etc,
then if you have a hardware problem, your whole business goes down.

Buy 3 or 4 smaller systems, and distribute any possible pain from
down time.

It seems like I'm going to contravene what I just said about eggs
in a basket when I suggest that the disks could possibly be concen-
trated into a NAS, so that you could get 1 big,  honkin fast *hot-
swappable* (dual-redundant U320 storage controllers w/ 512MB battery-
backed cache each, for a total of 1GB cache are easily available) 
disk subsystem for however many smaller CPU-boxes you get.  (They 
could be kept un-shared by making separate partitions, and each 
machine only mounts one partition.)

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Ron Johnson, Jr. ron.l.johnson@cox.net
Jefferson, LA USA

"Adventure is a sign of incompetence"
Stephanson, great polar explorer