Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

On 5/26/09 6:17 PM, "Greg Smith" <gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com> wrote:

> On Tue, 26 May 2009, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>
>> CMD doesn't rent hardware you would have to provide that, Rack Space
>> does.
>
> Part of the idea was to avoid buying a stack of servers, if this were just
> a "where do I put the boxes at?" problem I'd have just asked you about it
> already. I forgot to check Rack Space earlier, looks like they have Dell
> servers with up to 8 drives and a RAID controller in them available.
> Let's just hope it's not one of the completely useless PERC models there;
> can anyone confirm Dell's PowerEdge R900 has one of the decent performing
> PERC6 controllers I've heard rumors of in it?

Every managed hosting provider I've seen uses RAID controllers and support
through the hardware provider. If its Dell its 99% likely a PERC (OEM'd
LSI).
HP, theirs (not sure who the OEM is), Sun theirs (OEM'd Adaptec).

PERC6 in my testing was certainly better than PERC5, but its still sub-par
in sequential transfer rate or scaling up past 6 or so drives in a volume.

I did go through the process of using a managed hosting provider and getting
custom RAID card and storage arrays -- but that takes a lot of hand-holding
and time, and will most certainly cause setup delays and service issues when
things go wrong and you've got the black-sheep server. Unless its
absolutely business critical to get that last 10%-20% performance, I would
go with whatever they have with no customization.

Most likely if you ask for a database setup, they'll give you 6 or 8 drives
in raid-5. Most of what these guys do is set up LAMP cookie-cutters...

>
> Craig, I share your concerns about outsourced hosting, but as the only
> custom application involved is one I build my own RPMs for I'm not really
> concerned about the system getting screwed up software-wise. The idea
> here is that I might rent an eval system to confirm performance is
> reasonable, and if it is then I'd be clear to get a bigger stack of them.
> Luckily there's a guy here who knows a bit about benchmarking for this
> sort of thing...
>
> --
> * Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD
>
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