On Tue, 6 Apr 2004 22:31:02 -0700 Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com wrote:
Going under the assumption that we will be buying a new db server to replace geoffrin, please everyone take a look at: http://www.siliconmechanics.com/
and help me decide on a suitable configuration. Assume a budget of $9,000-$10,000, but don't hesitate to go under (of course!) or over (if for a good reason!).
There have been several requests (from more than one person, or just from one person) for 15k spindle drives. Is that a universal consensus? I find it hard to imagine that faster drives is really pertinent, because just about any problem that can be solved with faster drives can be solved better with more ram?
I hope I'm not the only one person would wish 15000 rpm disks :) I understand that they are more expensive, but our main problem in database is access time, and I dont think we can cache all the db in memory. On Suda, mysql use only 1,5G of memory (cause 32bits adressing pb IIRC), and it depends heavily on access time of disks. Cause of its slow disks, developper had to stop SQL query, search query and others stuffs. We're back in time before Geoffrin :( Having 15000 rpm disks, could let us some quiet time before thinking about a new upgrade. And it's not a cpu pb, cpu is idle most of time on Suda.
But, that's a very simplistic view on my part, so I could easily be convinced otherwise.
RAID 10? That's what geoffrin had, and it was sweet. But RAID 5 would give more disk space, right?
Raid10 is faster. I calculate, that the db is growing at around 1GBytes per week, So it could be an idea to have raid5 but with more than 3 disks (4 or 5 ?). Raid 10 with 15000 rpms is a pb cause we wont be able to get more space than 140 G with 4 disks (which should be enough for a year). So we could choose to have a similar setup than Geoffrin, with 4 10 000 rpm disks, 146GB for each disks. We would have 280GB of space, enough for some years.And we could use Suda as replicated server to search function or sql query (need to add more disks on Suda in all of case).
What are our disk requirements for the db server? Let's be generous with ourselves here. But, also let's think about whether disk space needs might in some cases be better handled by a big slow cheap SATA storage server?
We could think about SATA, but I think at it as a SAN or a NAS like the promise Vtrak 15100 :
http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?productId=115&fami...
And Western Digital produce SATA disks at 10000 RPM. It would be a nice idea, we could use an inexpensive raid 50, which must be fast and safety.
Shaihulud