Re: IDE versus SCSI - for amusement (probably)

I need to build a ~1 terabyte datawarehouse.

IDE
£200 1 10 bay case redundant PSU
£100 2 network cards
£200 dual athlon or p4 motherboard
£300 keyboard, monitor
£500 2 x CPU s ( c 1700 athlon, 2GHZ P4)
£2000 8 * 125 GB IDE hard drives
£100 Additional IDE controller card
£100 SCSI adapter for tape unit
£0 Linux to run it
£0 Oracle license (I've already got a corporate license)

Total so far: £3500

Oh I forgot the tape to back it up.

Sod it, it's cheaper just to buy another two machines and scatter them around the country and a cheap tape unit to send the deltas to them. Or even more attractively use a DVD RAM drive to write the data to DVD, assuming that the machines holds 5 years of data at 200GB per year each day's delta will fit on a DVD (or, for that matter, a CD).

So for £15000, I've got a 1TB data warehouse with double off-site redundancy, that will easily support 10-100 concurrent dw users.

Alternatively, for £5000 I've got 500GB data warehouse with all disks mirrored.

Note:
performance is almost certainly CPU bound (or should be) and this is as fast as a top end server only a few years ago. I've also got three servers to share the load.
I don't care if a disk fails every now and then because I've got two backup servers and I can easily arrange for disks to be copiable between them. I don't care if it takes a minute or two to switch from one machine to another - its a datawarehouse - they are rarely that mission critical.

This compares with what I've been told is > £150,000 for a 750GB SAN which took weeks to get working and which requires a £1200 fibre channel adapter in each client server. Presumably the weeks of vendor technicians' time was included in the price.

PS

SCSI
£200 1 10 bay case redundant PSU
£100 2 network cards
£200 dual athlon or p4 motherboard
£300 keyboard, monitor
£500 2 x CPU s ( c 1700 athlon, 2GHZ P4)
£6800 6 * 180 GB SCSI hard drives
£100 Additional IDE controller card
£100 SCSI adapter for tape unit
£0 Linux to run it
£0 Oracle license (I've already got a corporate license)

Total so far: £8300 Received on Tue Jan 15 2002 - 16:03:00 CST