Re: Hardware purchase question

Vivek,

> Dual Xeon 64bit with built-in 6-disk RAID10 or RAID5 (LSI RAID card)
> Dual Opteron 64bit with built-in 6-disk RAID10 or RAID5 (LSI RAID card)
> Dual Opteron 64bit with external RAID via fibre channel (eg, nstor)

Opteron over Xeon, no question.    Not only are the Opterons 
real-world-faster, they are less severely affected by the CS bug.

> I'm sure any of these will whip the bottom off the Dell 2650, but
> which will be the fastest overall?  No way to know without spending
> lots of money to test. :-(

The SAN is going to be faster with a good SAN.   That being said, I understand 
that "a good SAN" is something like a $30,000 NetApp; the less expensive 
SANs/NASes don't seem to be more than an external drive enclosure with a raid 
chip (e.g. Apple XRaid).   But we saw even a less expensive/slower EMC 
machine improve performance just moving the pg_xlog off of the local PERC 
RAID 5 and onto the SAN.  So this is probably a good way to go if you can 
afford it.

-- 
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco