On Mon, Aug 21, 2006 at 02:50:51PM -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
the NetApp over NFS, so I am not sure what performance to expect. Any suggestions about using network storage like this for the database?
Don't. Unless you're using a very small (toy-scale) database, the netapp storage is way too expensive for the kind of usage you see with a database application. You're much better off buying much cheaper storage twice and using a database replication solution than either choking a really expensive netapp or getting lousy performance from the same. The netapps have their niche, but database storage isn't it. (Peformance in general really isn't it--the advantages are managability, snapshotting, and cross-platform data exchange. It may be that those factors are important enough to make that a good solution for your particular situation, but they're generally not particularly relevant in the postgres space.)
Is there any consensus on whether to do WAL on a RAID-1 and PGDATA on a RAID-10 versus everything on a RAID-10? How does the number of disks I have affect this decision (I will probably have 4-8 disks per server).
You can't get a good answer without testing with your actual data. I'd suspect that with such a low number of disks you're better off with a single array, assuming that you have a good bbu raid controller and assuming that you're not doing write-mostly transaction work. But testing with your actual workload is the only way to really know.
Mike Stone
