> Dealing about the hardware, for the moment we have only a bi-pentium Xeon
> 2.8Ghz with 4 Gb of RAM ... and we saw we had bad performance results ...
> so
> we are thinking about a new solution with maybe several servers (server
> design may vary from one to other) ... to get a kind of cluster to get
> better
> performance ...
>
> Am I clear ?
yes. Clustering is not the answer to your problem. You need to build a bigger, faster box with lots of storage.
Clustering is
A: a headache
B: will cost you more, not less
C: not designed for what you are trying to do.
Going the x86 route, for about 20k$ you can get quad Opteron with 1-2 terabytes of storage (SATA), depending on how you
configureyour raid. This is the best bang for the buck you are going to get, period. Replicate for redundancy, not
performance.
If you are doing fair amount of writes, you will not be able to make a faster system than this for similar amount of
cash. You can drop the price a bit by pushing optional upgrades out to the future...
If this is not good enough for you, it's time to start thinking about a mid range server.
Merlin