Open Source for mission-critical systems (slightly OT)

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 02:15:40PM -0400, Andrew Hammond wrote:
> That requires synchronous replication. Oracle RAC for example. Unless
> you're willing to allow for committed transactions to be lost on
> failover. To do RAC properly, you better forget running it on some pissy
> little quad Xeon box.

As far as I recall the database server that futurephoto moved to
eventually (shortly after I left the company that build the site), was a
pair of fridge size sun's.  I think they might have been ultra450's or
something like that.  And yes they were running Oracle with synchornous
replication.  Porting our SQL was fairly trivial since we did all the
logic at the application level and only used the database for storage and
searching.  Perfectly standard SQL.

> And for those of you who think a quad xeon wasn't a pissy little box 3
> or 4 years ago, we're talking about database servers here. Anyone who'd
> spec a quad xeon for database work is clearly incompetent. The Xeon's
> FSB architecture (even for NUMA Xeon systems) has totally insufficient
> IO capacity for serious database work.

Certainly true.  Even an opteron is probably not equiped with enough I/O
bandwidth to compete with the big guys, although certainly better than
the xeon.

At least Intel appears to be finally getting ready to scrap the netburst
design and go back to the P6 derived design of the Pentium-M.  About
time.  The netburst design didn't impress me much when I first saw it,
the way previous new intel chips had done, and new amd chips.  It just
seemed wrong or backwards somehow.  The more I read about it, the less I
liked it.

Lennart Sorensen
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