Re: Hardware/OS recommendations for large databases (

Adam,

> -----Original Message-----
> From: pgsql-performance-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org
> [mailto:pgsql-performance-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of
> Claus Guttesen
> Sent: Tuesday, November 15, 2005 12:29 AM
> To: Adam Weisberg
> Cc: pgsql-performance(at)postgresql(dot)org
> Subject: Re: [PERFORM] Hardware/OS recommendations for large
> databases ( 5TB)
>
> > Does anyone have recommendations for hardware and/or OS to
> work with
> > around 5TB datasets?
>
> Hardware-wise I'd say dual core opterons. One
> dual-core-opteron performs better than two single-core at the
> same speed. Tyan makes some boards that have four sockets,
> thereby giving you 8 cpu's (if you need that many). Sun and
> HP also makes nice hardware although the Tyan board is more
> competetive priced.
>
> OS wise I would choose the FreeBSD amd64 port but
> partititions larger than 2 TB needs some special care, using
> gpt rather than disklabel etc., tools like fsck may not be
> able to completely check partitions larger than 2 TB. Linux
> or Solaris with either LVM or Veritas FS sounds like candidates.

I agree - you can get a very good one from www.acmemicro.com or
www.rackable.com with 8x 400GB SATA disks and the new 3Ware 9550SX SATA
RAID controller for about $6K with two Opteron 272 CPUs and 8GB of RAM
on a Tyan 2882 motherboard. We get about 400MB/s sustained disk read
performance on these (with tuning) on Linux using the xfs filesystem,
which is one of the most critical factors for large databases.

Note that you want to have your DBMS use all of the CPU and disk channel
bandwidth you have on each query, which takes a parallel database like
Bizgres MPP to achieve.

Regards,

- Luke