Seeking info/advice, SS1000 and SS20 configurations, Oracle server

   Am seeking advice and info about the strengths and weaknesses of Sun SS1000-based and SS20-based configurations. Will gladly post or E-mail summaries and/or contents of any responses received directly.

• We have been using Oracle on PC's, are upgrading to Oracle7 on an as-yet-to-be-chosen Sun system. Oracle users will still sit at PC's, using Oracle under Windows. Typically 3 or 4 Oracle users will be logged in simultaneously; maximum of about 10-12 Oracle users. All but one or two of these users are predicted to be "light" users, who will primarily run read-intensive queries. One or two "heavy" users will run both interactive queries and some batch jobs, including write-intensive update jobs. The Oracle data, indexes, etc., occupy a couple gigabytes now, with some growth. We are ordering about 10 gig of disk altogether.
• Additionally, 2 or 3 "heavy" users will _not_ use Oracle, but will use perl/awk/sed/groff/SGML parsers, etc., on files sized between 1 and 100 megabytes.
• Before the SS20 had been announced by Sun, Sun proposed a (2-cpu) SS1000-based configuration to us. We wonder now if a (2-cpu) SS20 might not be preferable. The SS20 seems to be suitably fast initially, and suitably scalable to support a fairly substantial (possible) increase in the projected Oracle usage and disk space .
• We wonder if the 2 or 3 "heavy" non-Oracle users should be segregated onto a second system--an SS20 or smaller--to prevent serious degradation of the Oracle server system's response time due to drain on cpu (and disk i/o) resources.
• We have followed the recent discussions of multiple-CPU Suns, but remain undereducated. With an SS20 or SS1000, could the sysadmin restrict specified "heavy user" login accounts, or sessions, or processes, to a specific cpu? If yes, it would not be so risky to put both Oracle and non-Oracle activities on the same server.
• We would be delighted to receive output generated by standard Sun or Solaris 2 statistics utilities, run on an in-use Oracle server system: "vmstat 1 300" and "iostat 1 300" and "ps -auxww", for example-- along with an indication of the Sun configuration on which the stats were generated: make/model/OS rev/MB of memory/number of users, etc. This would help us picture how substantial a system we actually need.

   Thanks in advance...

		       Steve Fick
                 Replies to: fick_at_hmco.com
InfoSoft International, 222 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA 02116
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