Right now, we have a few servers that host our databases. None of them
are redundant. Each hosts databases for one or more applications.
Things work reasonably well but I'm worried about the availability of
some of the sites. Our hardware is 3-4 years old at this point and I'm
not naive to the possibility of drives, memory, motherboards or whatever
failing.
I'm toying with the idea of adding a little redundancy and maybe some
performance to our setup. First, I'd replace are sata hard drives with
a scsi controller and two scsi hard drives that run raid 0 (probably
running the OS and logs on the original sata drive). Then I'd run the
previous two databases on one cluster of two servers with pgpool in
front (using the redundancy feature of pgpool).
Our applications are mostly read intensive. I don't think that having
two databases on one machine, where previously we had just one, would
add too much of an impact, especially if we use the load balance feature
of pgpool as well as the redundancy feature.
Can anyone comment on any gotchas or issues we might encounter? Do you
think this strategy has possibility to accomplish what I'm originally
setting out to do?
TIA
-Dennis