Suggestions/advice on choosing/configuring a high load/high reliabilty system

From: <smb_slb_at_my-dejanews.com>
Date: Fri, 21 May 1999 21:00:49 GMT
Message-ID: <7i4hi0$dh6$1@nnrp1.deja.com>

Hi all,

I've been implementing databases (Oracle & Sybase) for a number of years now, but I'm currently on an assignment where the performance requirements of the system are considerably greater than what I've worked with in the past. I'm looking for some information (both anecdotal & 'scientific' (i.e. articles)) on how to set this system up.

Here's the scenario: The system must be available 24/7, and will be receiving data at a rate of around 2-5 megabytes per second, although this throuput is mostly due to blobs, not zillions of transactions. The data will be coming in as "stores" of around 300K each, at the rate of 5 per second. Each store will consist of around 10-30 inserts, maybe 1 or 2 of which contain the blobs (the rest are small rowsize tables). There will be up to 10 "users" (actually they are machines - the system is a data-acquisition tool) creating this output.

The database will hold onto the blob data for about a week, then let it spool off. The starting configuration for the system will be about 200 Gigabytes of disk. More disk can be added to increase the amount of time you hold onto the blobs.

The rest of the system (client machines) will be NT boxes.

Here's my questions:

Should we go NT or SUN? This system will be sold "turnkey" to our customers, and our field techs will be responsible for handling problems. Is the added reliability & performance of a SUN box enough to justify the hassle of requiring our field techs to know 2 OS's?
- We obviously need some big RAID subsystem to handle this. Hot-swapping is absolutely necessary, since with 200 - 500 Gig of disk, you know they're going to be failing. What RAID level should we be running this at, and if we go for 'total safety' is there any reason to get another controller & disk to handle the log files & such, or will they actually be safer on our big fancy RAID?
- Will a 4 processor system be enough to handle this setup? Can NT deal gracefully with this much disk?
- What are some likely candidates for RAID systems & CPU's?

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