Vivek, > Dual Xeon 64bit with built-in 6-disk RAID10 or RAID5 (LSI RAID card) > Dual Opteron 64bit with built-in 6-disk RAID10 or RAID5 (LSI RAID card) > Dual Opteron 64bit with external RAID via fibre channel (eg, nstor)
Opteron over Xeon, no question. Not only are the Opterons real-world-faster, they are less severely affected by the CS bug. > I'm sure any of these will whip the bottom off the Dell 2650, but > which will be the fastest overall? No way to know without spending > lots of money to test. :-( The SAN is going to be faster with a good SAN. That being said, I understand that "a good SAN" is something like a $30,000 NetApp; the less expensive SANs/NASes don't seem to be more than an external drive enclosure with a raid chip (e.g. Apple XRaid). But we saw even a less expensive/slower EMC machine improve performance just moving the pg_xlog off of the local PERC RAID 5 and onto the SAN. So this is probably a good way to go if you can afford it. -- Josh Berkus Aglio Database Solutions San Francisco ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
