Re: Reliability recommendations

On Feb 24, 2006, at 9:29 AM, Bruce Momjian wrote:

> Dell often says part X is included, but part X is not the exact
> same as
> part X sold by the original manufacturer. To hit a specific price
> point, Dell is willing to strip thing out of commodity hardware, and
> often does so even when performance suffers. For many people, this is
> unacceptable.

The last dell box I bought, a PE1850, came with a PERC 4e/Si card,
which I believe is the same as the card the OP was looking at. It is
very fast in RAID1 with two U320 disks.

For real DB work, I'd look more to a dual channel card and have 1/2
of each mirror pair on opposing channels. Dell can configure that
for you, I'm sure.

I think the well tossed-around notion of Dells being underperforming
needs to be re-evaluated with the EM64T Xeon based systems. They are
quite fast. I haven't put a very large db with extreme loads on any
of these systems, but the simple benchmarking I did on them shows
them to be acceptable performers. The high-end RAID cards they sell
these days do not seem to me to be skimpy.

Now if they'd only get on the Opteron bandwagon....