Message-ID: <4285403A.50206@bigpond.net.au>
Date: Sat, 14 May 2005 10:03:06 +1000
From: David Brown <time@bigpond.net.au>
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To: Joel Fradkin <jfradkin@wazagua.com>
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: ok you all win what is best opteron (I dont want a
References: <009601c557f1$dd2f5a10$797ba8c0@jfradkin>
In-Reply-To: <009601c557f1$dd2f5a10$797ba8c0@jfradkin>
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Joel Fradkin wrote:

> Is the battery backed cache good or bad for Postgres?
>
Battery-backed avoids corruption if you have an unexpected power loss. 
It's considered mandatory with large-cache write-back controllers if you 
can't afford to lose any data.

> They are telling me I can only get a duel channel card if I want 
> hardware raid 10 on the 14 drives.
>
> I can get two cards but it has to be 7 and 7 (software raid?) which 
> does not sound like it fixes my single point of failure (one of the 
> listers mentioned my current system has 3 such single points).
>
Sounds like you need to try another vendor. Are you aiming for two RAID 
10 arrays or one RAID 10 and one RAID 5?

> Any of you hardware gurus spell out the optimal machine (I am hoping 
> to be around 15K, might be able to go more if it’s a huge difference, 
> I spent 30k on the Dell).
>
> I do not have to go HP, and after seeing the fail ratio from Monarch 
> from one lister I am bit scared shopping there.
>
There's unlikely to be many common components between their workstation 
and server offerings. You would expect case, power, graphics, 
motherboard, storage controller and drives to all be different. But I'd 
challenge that 50% failure stat anyway. Which components exactly? Hard 
drives? Power supplies?

> Was there a conclusion on where is best to get one (I really want two 
> one for development too).
>
Almost anyone can build a workstation or tower server, and almost anyone 
else can service it for you. It gets trickier when you're talking 2U and 
especially 1U. But really, these too can be maintained by anyone 
competent. So I wonder about some people's obsession with 
vendor-provided service.

Realistically, most Opteron solutions will use a Tyan motherboard (no 
idea if this includes HP). For 4-way systems, there's currently only the 
S4882, which includes an LSI dual channel SCSI controller. Different 
vendors get to use different cases and cooling solutions and pick a 
different brand/model of hard drive, but that's about it.

Tyan now also sells complete servers - hardly a stretch seeing they 
already make the most important bit (after the CPU). Given the level of 
interest in this forum, here's their list of US resellers:

http://www.tyan.com/products/html/us_alwa.html

If it's a tower server, build it yourself or pay someone to do it. It 
really isn't challenging for anyone knowledgeable about hardware.