AnandTech Hardware Upgrade - four is better than two
by Jason Clark on August 22, 2004 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
The Database Upgrade
For the past two years, we've been using two APPRO 1124 AMD Athlon MP 1U machines as our database servers; one ran the main site and the AD database, and the other ran the Forums database. They have worked very well for us, with an up-time of over 99%. Our only hardware failure with those machines was a couple of dead drives. We've been using two database servers in total to run the backend of AnandTech, mostly for redundancy. For this upgrade, we decided to go to one database server, which lessens the administration burden and keep one of the old APPRO servers as a cold backup if required. If you read our recent article on the Quad Opteron vs. Quad Xeon, you can probably guess which platform we chose.We selected the Quad AMD Opteron 848 Server , and outfitted it with 8GB of memory, running Windows 2003 Enterprise. Why Windows? We chose Windows because we run Microsoft SQL Server. The choice of the Opteron wasn't difficult; it was the fastest platform in our review under 32 bit, and it is ready for 64 bit when we are.
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JasonClark - Sunday, August 22, 2004 - link
#15, we used a quad opteron from the last review we did, http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=1935&am... Tyan also has a board out now, which is supposed to be decent.#16, tens of millions ;) Funny enough the most popular searched word on the main website is ASUS. Last month there were around 300,000 searches.
bobbozzo - Sunday, August 22, 2004 - link
Hi, How many Page Views does AnandTech get each month?How many searches do your users do?
Thanks!
kaborka - Sunday, August 22, 2004 - link
The article identified the CSI Designs RMHR 9000 case for the RAID array, but I didn't see which case and motherboard you picked for the computer. Did I miss this? We need to build a similar rig at work, and I'd like to know.JasonClark - Sunday, August 22, 2004 - link
#5, Yep windows 2003 enterprise 32 bit, 64 bit is still beta. Yes it supports 8GB of memory, it supports a maximum of 32GB of memory. SQL uses the AWE (Address Windowing Extensions) extensions to access all 8GB. It cost a fair bit, that's for sure. But, it was necessary, especially the firewall.#9, RAID 10 is faster, and is just as reliable. It is just more expensive as you get less space due to the mirror. Parity checks are expensive on databases, you would need a very expensive raid card to get close to RAID 10 performance.
#13, you betcha, we're tired of it as well. It won't be long now at all, we're talking weeks or less.
nourdmrolNMT1 - Sunday, August 22, 2004 - link
" since we've had a few "issues" with ColdFusion under load on the forums recently."JRUN JRUN, RUN J RUN!!!!!!!!!!!!! YAY FINALLY!!!
MIKE
DeeSlanger - Sunday, August 22, 2004 - link
Nice, lil tech tidbit for a Sunday read.Filibuster - Sunday, August 22, 2004 - link
Dopefiend,Raid 10 is just as reliable as Raid 5 but is not impeded by write performance because there is no parity to compute during writing.
It is 2 sets of 4 drives in a mirror.
In Raid 5 you'd have 8 drives and if _any_ two go out your array is dead, plus writes will be slower. If one drive goes out the performance will be even worse while it is not in service and during rebuilding.
In Raid 10 with 8 drives you could potentially lose up to 4 drives and still be ok, depending on which 4 they are, and writes will be signigicantly faster (and the controller doesn't have to be as expensive). The only time a 2 drive failure will lose the array is if they are the same pair of drives in the mirror. If you lose a drive your performance will not suffer either except during rebuilding, which again, does not require calculating parity to do it so even this will be faster.
DopeFiend - Sunday, August 22, 2004 - link
#1: That appears to be a buffer expansion slot for an onboard RAID controller. I've seen them before at work with the rackmounts we make, but I'm not entirely sure why it's an SDR slot!DopeFiend - Sunday, August 22, 2004 - link
(oops, blank post above).Why RAID-10 and not RAID-5? I can understand the need for performance, but surely RAID-5 would make more sense from a reliability standpoint?
DopeFiend - Sunday, August 22, 2004 - link