Re: Hardware: HP StorageWorks MSA 1500

I'd be interested in those numbers once you get them, especially for
ext3. We just picked up an HP MSA1500cs with the MSA50 sled, and I am
curious as to how best to configure it for Postgres. My server is the
HP DL585 (quad, dual-core Opteron, 16GB RAM) with 4 HD bays run by a HP
SmartArray 5i controller. I have 15 10K 300GB drives and 1 15K 150GB
drive (don't ask how that happened).

The database is going to be very datawarehouse-ish (bulk loads, lots of
queries) and has the potential to grow very large (1+ TB). Plus, with
that much data, actual backups won't be easy, so I'll be relying on
RAID+watchfullness to keep me safe, at least through the prototype
stages.

How would/do you guys set up your MSA1x00 with 1 drive sled? RAID10 vs
RAID5 across 10+ disks? Here's what I was thinking (ext3 across
everything):

Direct attached:
2x300GB RAID10 - OS + ETL staging area
2x300GB RAID10 - log + indexes
MSA1500:
10x300GB RAID10 + 1x300GB hot spare - tablespace

I'm not quite sure what to do with the 15K/150GB drive, since it is a
singleton. I'm also planning on giving all the 256MB MSA1500 cache to
reads, although I might change it for the batch loads to see if it
speeds things up.

Also, unfortunately, the MSA1500 only has a single SCSI bus, which
could significantly impact throughput, but we got a discount, so
hopefully we can get another bus module in the near future and pop it
in.

Any comments are appreciated,
-Mike