Oops! gearond@fireserve.net (Dennis Gearon) was seen spray-painting on a wall:
> Anyone got links to good db server boxes, not rackmount though?
>
> Include any for HP, Gateway, etc.
It's the components that matter moreso than the sticker on the front
of the box.
Presently, I have a Dell 6600 PowerEdge (I think that's the model)
named "hathi" (apparently that's Hindi for "elephant") under my desk;
4 Pentium IV's, 12 72GB drives, 8GB RAM, and one of those MegaRAID
controllers that has been discussed lately. It's being used for "data
warehouse" stuff, but I suspect it would make a better TP server than
anything else we've got locally.
It was consistently taking about 6-7 minutes to run a data load that,
on the "production" TP server (2 CPUs, only a couple SCSI drives),
took about 2.5h to load. Arguably, I should have done the load on
"hathi," and FTPed a tarball of the resulting database to production,
as that almost certainly would have saved a couple of hours! (There
were good reasons to not imagine that as a rational answer, but it's a
fun idea...)
If it weren't that the heat and the noise of the array of 6 fans was
annoying everyone around me, I'd like to keep it as my desktop box,
but any time I voice the suggestion, everyone objects vigorously :-).
But seriously, look for the right components, and make sure you have
goodly redundancy of things like fans and power supplies. Battery
backed cache on a RAID controller is just _gold_, performance-wise;
more RAM and more SCSI disks are always a nice thing too.
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