On 6/13/06, Jim C. Nasby <jnasby@pervasive.com> wrote: On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 05:40:58PM -0400, John Vincent wrote:
> Maybe from a postgresql perspective the cpus may be useless but the memory
> on the pSeries can't be beat. We've been looking at running our warehouse
> (PGSQL) in a LoP lpar but I wasn't able to find a LoP build of 8.1.
Probably just because not many people have access to that kind of
hardware. Have you tried building on Linux on Power?
Actually it's on my radar. I was looking for a precompiled build first (we actually checked the Pervasive and Bizgres sites first since we're considering a support contract) before going the self-compiled route. When I didn't see a pre-compiled build available, I started looking at the developer archives and got a little worried that I wouldn't want to base my job on a self-built Postgres on a fairly new (I'd consider Power 5 fairly new) platform.
As it stands we're currently migrating to an IBM x445 (8 XPU Xeon, 16GB of memory) that was our old DB2 production server.
Also, I believe Opterons can do up to 4 DIMMs per memory controller, so
with 2G sticks an 8 way Opteron could hit 64GB, which isn't exactly
shabby, and I suspect it'd cost quite a bit less than a comperable
p570...
This is true. In our case I couldn't get the approval for the new hardware since we had two x445 boxes sitting there doing nothing (I wanted them for our VMware environment personally). Another sticking point is finding a vendor that will provide a hardware support contract similar to what we have with our existing IBM hardware (24x7x4). Since IBM has f-all for Opteron based systems and we've sworn off Dell, I was pretty limited. HP was able to get in on a pilot program and we're considering them now for future hardware purchases but beyond Dell/IBM/HP, there's not much else that can provide the kind of hardware support turn-around we need.
> We've been thrilled with the performance of our DB2 systems that run on
> AIX/Power 5 but since the DB2 instance memory is limited to 18GB, we've got
> two 86GB p570s sitting there being under utilized.
--
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software http://pervasive.com work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf cell: 512-569-9461
--
John E. Vincent