Re: Hardware config for Data Warehousing ??

A couple of thoughts for you:

First we, have an EMC Symmetrix running RAID-S. Since our D/W is just getting off the ground, I don't have a lot of experience with it yet. The Symmetrix can also be run mirrored -- effective disk capacity is 50% as opposed to 75% under RAID-S. There is a slight decrease in write performance in the RAID-S but, EMC is big on gobs of cache memory and, a D/W is more about reads than writes, unless huge amounts of data must be loaded in a small time window.

The Symmetrix may be over kill for only 20-40 GB. You may want to investigate IBM's SSA drives and the RS/6000 platform.

A big question with hardware platform is whether to go SMP or MPP (unless you data growth will beyond 500 GB -- or what ever the experts are saying now -- SMP sounds adequate for your requirement.)

HTH.

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