Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 8:27 PM, Scott Carey <scott(at)richrelevance(dot)com> wrote:

>> Yeah, the OP would be much better served ordering a server with an
>> Areca or Escalade / 3ware controller setup and ready to go, shipped to
>> the hosting center and sshing in and doing the rest than letting a
>> hosted solution company try to compete.  You can get a nice 16x15K SAS
>> disk machine with an Areca controller, dual QC cpus, and 16 to 32 gig
>> ram for $6000 to $8000 ready to go.  We've since repurposed our Dell /
>> PERC machines as file servers and left the real database server work
>> to our aberdeen machines.  Trying to wring reasonable performance out
>> of most Dell servers is a testament to frustration.
>>
>
> For a permanent server, yes.  But for a sort lease?  You have to go with
> what is easily available for lease, or work out something with a provider
> where they buy the HW from you and manage/lease it back (some do this, but
> all I've ever heard of involved 12+ servers to do so and sign on for 1 or 2
> years).

True, but given the low cost of a high drive count machine with spares
etc you can come away spending a lot less than by leasing.

> Expecting full I/O performance out of a DELL with a PERC is not really
> possible, but maybe that's not as important as a certain pricing model or
> the flexibility?  That is really an independent business decision.

True. Plus if you only need 4 drives or something, you can do pretty
well with a Dell with the RAID controller turned to JBOD and letting
the linux kernel do the RAID work.

> I'll also but a caveat to the '3ware' above -- the last few I've used were
> slower than the PERC (9650 series versus PERC6, 9550 versus PERC5  -- all
> tests with 12 SATA drives raid 10).
> I have no experience with the 3ware 9690 series (SAS) though -- those might
> be just fine.

My experience is primarily with Areca 1100, 1200, and 1600 series
controllers, but others on the list have done well with 3ware
controllers. We have an 8 port 11xx series areca card at work running
RAID-6 as a multipurpose server, and it's really quite fast and well
behaved for sequential throughput. But the 16xx series cards stomp
the 11xx series in the ground for random IOPS.