Re: Reliability recommendations

After takin a swig o' Arrakan spice grog, jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com ("Joshua D. Drake") belched out:
> 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.

> You should probably review the archives for PostgreSQL user
> experience with Dell's before you purchase one.

Hear, hear! We found Dell servers were big-time underperformers.

Generic hardware put together with generally the same brand names of
components (e.g. - for SCSI controllers and such) would generally play
much better.

For the cheapo desktop boxes they obviously have to buy the "cheapest
hardware available this week;" it sure seems as though they engage in
the same sort of thing with the "server class" hardware.

I don't think anyone has been able to forcibly point out any
completely precise shortcoming; just that they underperform what the
specs suggest they ought to be able to provide.

>> 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.

> HAHAHAHAHA.... Don't do that. Dell is making the assumption you
> won't do your homework. Make sure you cross quote with IBM, Compaq
> and Penguin Computing...

Indeed.
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