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Gear / Technical Help => Post-Processing, Computer / Streaming / Internet Devices & Related Activity => Topic started by: phanophish on June 17, 2009, 10:56:53 AM

Title: Can't believe how cheap servers are these days
Post by: phanophish on June 17, 2009, 10:56:53 AM

So I'm pricing out a new database environment for an application at work.  Decided to pretty much go to the top end for a stand alone MySQL database servers.  So I speced out the box below....

IBM 3650 Rack Mount
Dual Quad Xenons 2.26GHz 8MB L3 Cache
12 - 73GB 15K 6Gbps SAS Drives  (2 Drive RAID1 Boot, 8 Drive Raid 10 Data volume)
16GB DDR3 1033 RAM
Redundant power
Remote management card
3yr 24/7/4 support

Essentially a smoking fast database box that came in at less than $6500 for the hardware.  Seriously the pricing amazes me.  And the server will really kick some hiney.  I remember paying nearly that for some simple file servers with just 72GB of RAID 5 storage & 2GB of RAM a few years ago.

Title: Re: Can't believe how cheap servers are these days
Post by: Sebastian on June 18, 2009, 02:26:56 PM

I'm currently doing an internship at IBM and my team just recently got two new servers, too. It was quite mindboggling for me to just throw some 48 GB of RAM and 20 x 1TB drives at the things ;)

But why in the world are you running MySQL on such a machine? I haven't worked with it for a few years, but does it really scale up to such dimensions these days?

Title: Re: Can't believe how cheap servers are these days
Post by: phanophish on June 18, 2009, 03:00:19 PM

Yea, it will run fine on a machine like this.  Essentially we are using the RAM to aggressively cache table data for improved query performance. really fast disk so anything that happens not to be cached will still preform well, but it gives us headroom for replication & backup to be preformed concurrently to production.  The system is used to manage a large order picking/fulfillment system for an online sales business.

Title: Re: Can't believe how cheap servers are these days
Post by: Sebastian on June 18, 2009, 04:21:56 PM

Quote from: phanophish on June 18, 2009, 03:00:19 PM

Yea, it will run fine on a machine like this.  Essentially we are using the RAM to aggressively cache table data for improved query performance.

Ah, I see. The one thing MySQL is really good at: fast reads ;)

But what I was really trying to ask... Is MySQL still lacking the more professional features like tablespaces and incremental backups/point in time recovery?

Title: Re: Can't believe how cheap servers are these days
Post by: phanophish on June 18, 2009, 05:04:05 PM

Quote from: Sebastian on June 18, 2009, 04:21:56 PM

Quote from: phanophish on June 18, 2009, 03:00:19 PM

Yea, it will run fine on a machine like this.  Essentially we are using the RAM to aggressively cache table data for improved query performance.

Ah, I see. The one thing MySQL is really good at: fast reads ;)

But what I was really trying to ask... Is MySQL still lacking the more professional features like tablespaces and incremental backups/point in time recovery?

Not sure, our use is pretty much real time so we don't have a need for that.  By the time any data is 4 hours old it is of no value