[SAC] Server quote/discussions

[Martin Spott]

On Mon, Feb 01, 2010 at 11:26:56PM -0500, Daniel Morissette wrote:

> What I meant was that instead of two 7.5k$ machines (15k$) we could  
> possibly get more power, storage and redundancy out of a cluster of four  
> 3k$ machines (12k$), by going with (cheaper) SATA disks and sticking to  
> 16-32GB RAM per box (using 2-4GB DIMMs) instead of going with the more  
> expensive 8GB or 16GB DIMMs.

I agree partially since nowadays you're already getting pretty nice
boxes for small money, for example at Sun Microsystems (or Dell,
whereas Sun would certainly be my personal favourite).

But please don't use cheap disks. Low latency at the disk subsystem is
a top priority for setups with pretty much 'random' load like here,
even more when you're going for virtualization, and making a bad
decision here is going to hurt you for years - without having much of a
handle to fix it.

Therefore I'd say that 10k or 15k SAS disks and no RAID6 !! (have you
ever seen a fast as well as reasonably priced RAID6 controller ?) is
almost a must.

Cheers,
	Martin.
-- 
 Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are !
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