Re: Resources for estimating hardware requirements

BigBoote66_at_hotmail.com wrote:

> The load profile is going to be about 25 transactions per second, with
> each transaction inserting a row into a header table & about 150 rows
> into a detail table (with the detail table being about 30 - 50 bytes
> long). Given the nature of the collection (each transaction is
> generated 5 times per minute by each of 300 tools), I don't anticipate
> particularly high load spikes, and if the stores lag behind a bit due
> to heavy loading, it isn't a concern, so the say that peak capapcity
> would be no more than 40 transactions/second. This boils down to about
> 325 million rows per day, about 125 billion rows per year. The
> customer wants to hold onto data for about a year, which means at least
> 20 terabtyes of data online, although we can probably convince them to
> keep only 4 months.
>
> Thanks,
> -Steve

You are looking at less than 4,000 inserts per second which would be easily achievable on my notebook computer. So inserting should not be much of an issue. Thus the issue is really on the other side of the equation ... getting useful information back out in a timely manner.

The first thing I would want to do is understand the data and how it is going to be used. And to what extent range, list, and hash partitioning might be useful.

Then, after understanding that, I would look at the requirements related to data safety. Would you be implementing archive logging? flashback? what is the tolerance for down-time related to loss of a resource.

Then what you really need is a storage engineer to look at the various options SAN, NAS, etc., the number of LUNS, zoning of switches, redundant pathing and make some recommendations based on past experience. Generally I would rely on EMC, NetApp, LSI, Apple, or someone like that to do it.

Then bring in on a try-and-buy sample hardware and evaluate real-time performance versus the engineer's predictions.

HTH

-- 
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)