Re: Reliability recommendations

Thanks for everyone's feedback. I will definitely take the hardware
comments into consideration when purchasing future hardware. I am
located in Atlanta, GA. If Dell has such a bad reputation with this
list, does anyone have good vendor recommendations?

Although most of the responses were hardware-oriented (which was
probably my fault for not clearly stating my question), I am mostly
interested in replication/clustering ways of solving the issue. My
example of Dell quoting us $50k for a SAN was meant to sound ridiculous
and is definitely not something we are considering.

What we are really after is a good clustering or replication solution
where we can run PostgreSQL on a small set of servers and have failover
capabilities. While RAID is great, our last failure was a CPU failure
so a multi-server approach is something we want. Does anyone have any
recommendations as far as a clustering/replication solutions, regardless
of hardware? I know there are several open-source and commercial
postgres replication solutions - any good or bad experiences? Also, any
opinions on shared storage and clustering vs separate internal storage.

Since performance is not our current bottleneck, I would imagine
Master->Slave replication would be sufficient, although performance
gains are always welcome. I don't have much experience with setting
PostgreSQL in a replicated or clustered manner, so anything to point me
in the right direction both hardware and software wise would be
appreciated!

Thanks for all of the responses!

On Wed, 15 Feb 2006 14:53:28 -0500, "Ron" <rjpeace(at)earthlink(dot)net> said:
> At 11:21 AM 2/15/2006, Jeremy Haile wrote:
> >We are a small company looking to put together the most cost effective
> >solution for our production database environment. Currently in
> >production Postgres 8.1 is running on this machine:
> >
> >Dell 2850
> >2 x 3.0 Ghz Xeon 800Mhz FSB 2MB Cache
> >4 GB DDR2 400 Mhz
> >2 x 73 GB 10K SCSI RAID 1 (for xlog and OS)
> >4 x 146 GB 10K SCSI RAID 10 (for postgres data)
> >Perc4ei controller
> >
> >The above is a standard Dell box with nothing added or modified beyond
> >the options available directly through Dell. We had a bad processor last
> >week that effectively put us down for an entire weekend. Though it was
> >the web server that failed, the experience has caused us to step back
> >and spend time coming up with a more reliable/fail-safe solution that
> >can reduce downtime.
> >
> >Our load won't be substantial so extreme performance and load balancing
> >are not huge concerns. We are looking for good performance, at a good
> >price, configured in the most redundant, high availability manner
> >possible. Availability is the biggest priority.
> >
> >I sent our scenario to our sales team at Dell and they came back with
> >all manner of SAN, DAS, and configuration costing as much as $50k.
> >
> >We have the budget to purchase 2-3 additional machines along the lines
> >of the one listed above. As a startup with a limited budget, what would
> >this list suggest as options for clustering/replication or setting our
> >database up well in general?
>
> 1= Tell Dell "Thanks but no thanks." and do not buy any more
> equipment from them. Their value per $$ is less than other options
> available to you.
>
> 2= The current best bang for the buck HW (and in many cases, best
> performing as well) for pg:
> a= AMD K8 and K9 (dual core) CPUs. Particularly the A64 X2 3800+
> when getting the most for your $$ matters a lot
> pg gets a nice performance boost from running in 64b.
> b= Decent Kx server boards are available from Gigabyte, IWill,
> MSI, Supermicro, and Tyan to name a few.
> IWill has a 2P 16 DIMM slot board that is particularly nice
> for a server that needs lots of RAM.
> c= Don't bother with SCSI or FC HD's unless you are doing the most
> demanding kind of OLTP. SATA II HD's provide better value.
> d= HW RAID controllers are only worth it in certain
> scenarios. Using RAID 5 almost always means you should use a HW RAID
> controller.
> e= The only HW RAID controllers worth the $$ for you are 3ware
> Escalade 9550SX's and Areca ARC-11xx or ARC-12xx's.
> *For the vast majority of throughput situations, the ARC-1xxx's
> with >= 1GB of battery backed WB cache are the best value*
> f= 1GB RAM sticks are cheap enough and provide enough value that
> you should max out any system you get with them.
> g= for +high+ speed fail over, Chelsio and others are now making
> PCI-X and PCI-E 10GbE NICs at reasonable prices.
> The above should serve as a good "pick list" for the components of
> any servers you need.
>
> 3= The most economically sound HW and SW architecture that best suits
> your performance and reliability needs is context dependent to your
> specific circumstances.
>
>
> Where are you located?
> Ron
>
>
>