Re: large database

On 12/10/2012 1:26 PM, Mihai Popa wrote:
>
> Second, where should I deploy it? The cloud or a dedicated box?
>
> Amazon seems like the sensible choice; you can scale it up and down as
> needed and backup is handled automatically.
> I was thinking of an x-large RDS instance with 10000 IOPS and 1 TB of
> storage. Would this do, or will I end up with a larger/ more expensive
> instance?
>
> Alternatively I looked at a Dell server with 32 GB of RAM and some
> really good hard drives. But such a box does not come cheap and I don't
> want to keep the pieces if it doesn't cut it
>

Note that it will be much cheaper to buy a machine from the likes of
Newegg or Amazon as parts and put it together yourself, if you have the
time to spare and don't care about a Dell warranty. We've been deploying
64G hex-core Xeon Ivy Bridge boxes with 300G SSD for about $2500.
Another 300G SSD for your database size would add about $1200. The newer
Intel DC-series SSDs should be cheaper, but are not yet available. So as
someone else pointed out you could buy a very capable box outright for
the cost of a few months Amazon fees.

I'm not sure I'd worry too much about how to do backups (Amazon just
copies the data the same as you can, to an external drive) but if you
need things like spare machines, pay a human to manage them and so on,
then there are cost benefits to the cloud approach. It also allows you
to blame someone else if something goes wrong.