On Jun 15, 2006, at 1:10 PM, Steve Poe wrote:
Vivek, Thanks for your feedback. Which Dell server did you purchase?
I have many many dell rackmounts: 1550, 1650, 1750, 1850, and SC1425 and throw in a couple of 2450.
I *really* like the 1850 with built-in SCSI RAID. It is fast enough to be a replica of my primary bread and butter database running on a beefy opteron system (using Slony-1 replication).
The SC1425 boxes make for good, cheap web front end servers. We buy 'em in pairs and load balance them at the network layer using CARP.
At the office we have mostly SC400 series (400, 420, and 430) for our servers. The latest box is an SC430 with dual core pentium D and dual SATA drives running software mirror. It pushes over 20MB/s on the disks, which is pretty impressive for the hardware.
The client has a PowerEdge 2600 and they STILL want Dell. Again, if it were my pocketbook, Dell would not be there.
I lucked out and skipped the 2650 line, apparently :-)I used the 2450's as my DB servers and they were barely adequate once we got beyond our startup phase, and moving them over to Opteron was a godsend. I tried some small opteron systems vendor but had QC issues (1 of 5 systems stable), so went with Sun and have not looked back. I still buy Dell's for all other server purposes mainly because it is convenient in terms of purchasing and getting support (ie, business reasons).
And I don't spend all my time babysitting these boxes, like others imply.
The client has a 30GB DB. This is large for me, but probably not with you. Also, I am advising the client to go to a 10+ disc array (from 3) and enough RAM to load half the DB into memory.
30GB DB on a 10 disk array seems overkill, considering that the smallest disks you're going to get will be 36GB (or perhaps 72Gb by now).
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