Re: Hosted servers with good DB disk performance?

On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 7:41 PM, Scott Carey <scott@richrelevance.com> wrote:
>
> On 5/26/09 6:17 PM, "Greg Smith" <gsmith@gregsmith.com> wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 26 May 2009, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>>
>>> CMD doesn't rent hardware you would have to provide that, Rack Space
>>> does.
>>
>> Part of the idea was to avoid buying a stack of servers, if this were just
>> a "where do I put the boxes at?" problem I'd have just asked you about it
>> already.  I forgot to check Rack Space earlier, looks like they have Dell
>> servers with up to 8 drives and a RAID controller in them available.
>> Let's just hope it's not one of the completely useless PERC models there;
>> can anyone confirm Dell's PowerEdge R900 has one of the decent performing
>> PERC6 controllers I've heard rumors of in it?
>
> Every managed hosting provider I've seen uses RAID controllers and support
> through the hardware provider.  If its Dell its 99% likely a PERC (OEM'd
> LSI).
> HP, theirs (not sure who the OEM is), Sun theirs (OEM'd Adaptec).
>
> PERC6 in my testing was certainly better than PERC5, but its still sub-par
> in sequential transfer rate or scaling up past 6 or so drives in a volume.
>
> I did go through the process of using a managed hosting provider and getting
> custom RAID card and storage arrays -- but that takes a lot of hand-holding
> and time, and will most certainly cause setup delays and service issues when
> things go wrong and you've got the black-sheep server.  Unless its
> absolutely business critical to get that last 10%-20% performance, I would
> go with whatever they have with no customization.
>
> Most likely if you ask for a database setup, they'll give you 6 or 8 drives
> in raid-5.  Most of what these guys do is set up LAMP cookie-cutters...
>
>>
>> Craig, I share your concerns about outsourced hosting, but as the only
>> custom application involved is one I build my own RPMs for I'm not really
>> concerned about the system getting screwed up software-wise.  The idea
>> here is that I might rent an eval system to confirm performance is
>> reasonable, and if it is then I'd be clear to get a bigger stack of them.
>> Luckily there's a guy here who knows a bit about benchmarking for this
>> sort of thing...

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.