Re: Hardware/OS recommendations for large databases (

I agree - you can get a very good one from www.acmemicro.com or

www.rackable.com with 8x 400GB SATA disks and the new 3Ware 9550SX SATA

RAID controller for about $6K with two Opteron 272 CPUs and 8GB of RAM

on a Tyan 2882 motherboard.  We get about 400MB/s sustained disk read

performance on these (with tuning) on Linux using the xfs filesystem,

which is one of the most critical factors for large databases.  

Note that you want to have your DBMS use all of the CPU and disk channel

bandwidth you have on each query, which takes a parallel database like

Bizgres MPP to achieve.

Regards,