Re: Freebsd vs linux and hardware question

On Fri, Sep 19, 2003 at 05:37:22PM -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> Good to know .... sometime I'd like to talk to you about the cost/benefit of
> using a NAS for Postgres.

We use a Network Appliance Filer (www.netapp.com) - a baby one, the F85 for
file/mail/postgres storage as well as application directories (apache,
postgresql, tomcat). There are probably cheaper NAS' that would do the job,
but we've been using Netapps since '97 for USENET news (before inn2) and
web/mail hosting in an ISP environment and they simply work. They also take
the hassle out of growing filesystems (just add a drive and type in one
command, a few minutes later, you can use the addl space), replacing failed
drives etc.. In this particular case, we could have gone for a Gigabit
interface that would probably have solved the problem, but since we have a way
around it in Postgres, that's not necessary.

There are a bunch of people using Netapps with Oracle and Informix but it
doesn't seem to be too popular with the Postgresql crowd (probably due to
cost and hangups about NFS).

Here's a link to netapps various whitepapers on the subject:

http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/index_db.html#toc

though I must say that I'm not convinced that it's absolutely necessary unless
you demand 24x7 and online disk replacement/filesystem growth...

Aditya