I am trying to decide what kind of storage options to use for a pair of
good database servers, a primary and a read-only that can be a failover.
Here is what I'm thinking so far:
(1) We have a nice NetApp that can do iSCSI. It has a large (multi-GB)
battery-backed cache so it could potentially perform the transactions at
a very high rate. However there are many other applications accessing
the NetApp over NFS, so I am not sure what performance to expect. Any
suggestions about using network storage like this for the database? Will
the database make huge demands on the NetApp, and force my department
spend huge amounts on new NetApp hardware?
(2) I read with interest this thread:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-performance/2006-08/msg00164.php
Is there any consensus on whether to do WAL on a RAID-1 and PGDATA on a
RAID-10 versus everything on a RAID-10? How does the number of disks I
have affect this decision (I will probably have 4-8 disks per server).
Some of the applications I initially need to support will be a high
volume of simple transactions without many tablescans, if that helps.
However, I expect that these servers will need to serve many needs.
Any other suggestions are appreciated. Is there a common place to look
for hardware suggestions (like a postgresql hardware FAQ)?
Regards,
Jeff Davis