On 18-3-2011 4:02 Scott Marlowe wrote:
On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 6:51 PM, Oliver Charles <postgresql-perf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: Another point. My experience with 1U chassis and cooling is that they don't move enough air across their cards to make sure they stay cool. You'd be better off ordering a 2U chassis with 8 3.5" drive bays so you can add drives later if you need to, and it'll provide more cooling air across the card. Our current big 48 core servers are running plain LSI SAS adapters without HW RAID because the LSI 8888s we were using overheated and cooked themselves to death after about 3 months. Those are 1U chassis machines, and our newer machines are all 2U boxes now.
We have several 1U boxes (mostly Dell and Sun) running and had several in the past. And we've never had any heating problems with them. That includes machines with more power hungry processors than are currently available, all power slurping FB-dimm slots occupied and two raid cards installed.
But than again, a 2U box will likely have more cooling capacity, no matter how you look at it.
Another tip that may be useful; look at 2.5" drives. Afaik there is no really good reason to use 3.5" drives for new servers. The 2.5" drives save power and room - and thus may allow more air flowing through the enclosure - and offer the same performance and reliability (the first I know for sure, the second I'm pretty sure of but haven't seen much proof of lately).
You could even have a 8- or 10-disk 1U enclosure in that way or up to 24 disks in 2U. But those configurations will require some attention to cooling again.
Best regards, Arjen -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
