*thug* .. I just dropped dead .. what a server

jibbajabba

Can't wait for the kit to arrive, just got an order through for a customer

4x Xeon E7-4870 (that's 40 hyperthreaded cores = 80 logical cores)
1TB DDR 3 ECC Ram
2x 147GB SAS in Raid 1
3 x 640 GB Fusion IO drives in Raid 0 (yes, Raid 0 - they NEED the IO)

That's gonna be a SQL server .. one out of many mind you

I think I just drooled all over my desk ... Those Fusion IO cards alone are $10k each ...

hex_omega

The hot babe handling this thing says it all.

jibbajabba

hex_omega wrote: »

The hot babe handling this thing says it all.

Oh nice ... I thought the boxes alone are pretty (eek, got the consignment through for 12 )

(Although I think our manager would punch her for getting that close to the connector lol)

RobertKaucher

I have server envy.

CodeBlox

Damn, I'm still fairly a newbie but 1tb or ram!!?? Also, why not raid 5?

jibbajabba

Raid 5 is good for resilience but not for speed hence Raid 0 (they obviously use more than one of those server). Raid5 is probably the worst for DB server really

cablegod

Gomjaba wrote: »

Raid 5 is good for resilience but not for speed hence Raid 0 (they obviously use more than one of those server). Raid5 is probably the worst for DB server really

Go ahead and put their SQL DB on RAID0 and when it does fail, make sure you can run fast enough If they NEED the IOPS, go with one more card to use RAID10 and don't worry about the cost because that's a cost of doing business if you need that kind of horsepower. One more card is all you need to make that happen. I have done a lot of work over the past year with Fusion-io SSD and almost every manufacturer of SSD available today. I will tell you, they ALL can & will fail. Its not a matter of if it will fail. Its just a matter of time and you need to design for it from the beginning. I wouldn't even suggest putting it on a single FIO drive. Go with at least 2 in RAID1. Don't take this the wrong way, I am just trying to help you out because I was in a similar situation about a year ago. I just had to back away and tell them if they insist on RAID0, the safety of their SQL DB cannot be guaranteed. If it is not a critical or production box, you'll probably be ok though. Just remember it is RAID0.

This is what several of them can do in RAID10 running an Oracle 11g DB:

Forsaken_GA

CodeBlox wrote: »

Damn, I'm still fairly a newbie but 1tb or ram!!?? Also, why not raid 5?

Go talk to a good DBA about running a database server on a RAID 5.

Make sure you take riot gear along. You'll need it.

Forsaken_GA

cablegod wrote: »

Go ahead and put their SQL DB on RAID0 and when it does fail, make sure you can run fast enough If they NEED the IOPS, go with one more card to use RAID10 and don't worry about the cost because that's a cost of doing business if you need that kind of horsepower. One more card is all you need to make that happen. I have done a lot of work over the past year with Fusion-io SSD and almost every manufacturer of SSD available today. I will tell you, they ALL can & will fail. Its not a matter of if it will fail. Its just a matter of time and you need to design for it from the beginning. I wouldn't even suggest putting it on a single FIO drive. Go with at least 2 in RAID1. Don't take this the wrong way, I am just trying to help you out because I was in a similar situation about a year ago. I just had to back away and tell them if they insist on RAID0, the safety of their SQL DB cannot be guaranteed. If it is not a critical or production box, you'll probably be ok though. Just remember it is RAID0.

There's a sound arguement for running it on RAID 0. The extra performance makes a difference on a heavy DB server.

But that's also why you run redundant backup servers, and probably employ clustering to begin with. If you've got two or three other DB's in the cluster that can handle the load when a drive fails, it's not such a big deal, it'll take a little bit of effort to get the DB back up to speed, but unless you have simultaneous catastrophic failure, it won't be that bad.

However, like you, I would heavily push for RAID 10 instead. I would not want to be the poor admin having to deal with a failed RAID 0.

cablegod

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

Go talk to a good DBA about running a database server on a RAID 5.

Make sure you take riot gear along. You'll need it.

RAID5 is good for read-only tablespaces

Forsaken_GA

cablegod wrote: »

RAID5 is good for read-only tablespaces

Yup, and that's pretty much the only good thing you can say about it from a database perspective.

I could repeat what our local DBA's have to say about it's downsides, but the variety and quantity of explicatives would probably earn me a visit from The Ban Hammer. (Note: they're forced to live with a heavy use production database server running on a RAID 5, so it's a daily rant)

azjag

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

Yup, and that's pretty much the only good thing you can say about it from a database perspective.

I could repeat what our local DBA's have to say about it's downsides, but the variety and quantity of explicatives would probably earn me a visit from The Ban Hammer. (Note: they're forced to live with a heavy use production database server running on a RAID 5, so it's a daily rant)

The newbie DBA at my job complained about the speed of our sql clusters and asked about swapping the drives on the RAID 5 sql clusters with SSD's. He went so far as to get a quote for replacing the drives. The HP sales guy is still beating our door down after we said no. Apparently the shop he came from was using SSD's and he has had a hard time adjusting from private sector to public sector employment.

Turgon

hex_omega wrote: »

The hot babe handling this thing says it all.

We need more women like this in IT. It will make network rescues that run long into the night more bareable.

jibbajabba

cablegod wrote: »

Go ahead and put their SQL DB on RAID0 and when it does fail, make sure you can run fast enough If they NEED the IOPS, go with one more card to use RAID10 and don't worry about the cost because that's a cost of doing business if you need that kind of horsepower. One more card is all you need to make that happen. I have done a lot of work over the past year with Fusion-io SSD and almost every manufacturer of SSD available today. I will tell you, they ALL can & will fail. Its not a matter of if it will fail. Its just a matter of time and you need to design for it from the beginning. I wouldn't even suggest putting it on a single FIO drive. Go with at least 2 in RAID1. Don't take this the wrong way, I am just trying to help you out because I was in a similar situation about a year ago. I just had to back away and tell them if they insist on RAID0, the safety of their SQL DB cannot be guaranteed. If it is not a critical or production box, you'll probably be ok though. Just remember it is RAID0.

This is what several of them can do in RAID10 running an Oracle 11g DB:

Nah believe me, they have done extensive testing and there is no need for Raid1 or 10 as they have multiple server and it doesn't matter when one disk fails and the array / data is lost ... They put IO before redundancy .. Which is why they use multiple server and they can easily lose half a rack and still run as if nothing has happened ..

I know when people hear Raid0 the alarm bells go off, but in this case it is all under control ..

Everyone

Holy crap! Must be some massive databases they'll be handling.

Yeah you don't need redundancy at the disk level for a database server if it is going to be part of a cluster. The databases will be replicated to other servers, and picked right up if one of the servers fails.

Interesting that they are using local storage though. I'd think a high performance SAN would be better. Although I can't say that I've seen an SSD SAN, I'm sure someone makes them by now, I've just never had the need to look for one.

jibbajabba

Everyone wrote: »

Holy crap! Must be some massive databases they'll be handling.

Yeah you don't need redundancy at the disk level for a database server if it is going to be part of a cluster. The databases will be replicated to other servers, and picked right up if one of the servers fails.

Interesting that they are using local storage though. I'd think a high performance SAN would be better. Although I can't say that I've seen an SSD SAN, I'm sure someone makes them by now, I've just never had the need to look for one.

Nope .. we have evaluated every major SAN manufacturer, ISCSI or FC and those SSDs in Raid 0 blows every performance out of the water .. I see if I can find the IO stats ...

Even SSD SANs (such as Dell Equallogics) aren't even a challenge for those Fusion IO cards - you get what you pay for ey

cablegod

Gomjaba wrote: »

Nope .. we have evaluated every major SAN manufacturer, ISCSI or FC and those SSDs in Raid 0 blows every performance out of the water .. I see if I can find the IO stats ...

Even SSD SANs (such as Dell Equallogics) aren't even a challenge for those Fusion IO cards - you get what you pay for ey

I agree. I have seen servers with several Fusion-io cards in one chassis break 12GB/s and over 1 Million IOPS. Traditional SAN isn't anywhere close unless you want many cabinets full of nothing but disk and storage processors driving up your energy and cooling costs and adding complexity to your environment.

MrAgent

I currently work for Fusion-IO. It seems more and more companies are buying our product.

Quick story. I have a couple of different models here that I use to test different things. I recently created a video that was about 1100 megs (720 HD resolution), and having an ioDuo installed in the system, it rendered the video in less than 3 minutes. I always love seeing things like this, and when customers share their IO results etc.

jibbajabba

MrAgent wrote: »

I currently work for Fusion-IO. It seems more and more companies are buying our product.

Quick story. I have a couple of different models here that I use to test different things. I recently created a video that was about 1100 megs (720 HD resolution), and having an ioDuo installed in the system, it rendered the video in less than 3 minutes. I always love seeing things like this, and when customers share their IO results etc.

So when can we boot from them then

MrAgent

I wish I had an answer for that. It would be great if they were bootable.

SteveLord

I can't get over this thread title. "Thug! I just dropped dead!"

phoeneous

Forsaken_GA wrote: »

Go talk to a good DBA about running a database server on a RAID 5.

Make sure you take riot gear along. You'll need it.

Even for smaller databases, say under 5GB?

it_consultant

Gomjaba wrote: »

Can't wait for the kit to arrive, just got an order through for a customer

4x Xeon E7-4870 (that's 40 hyperthreaded cores = 80 logical cores)
1TB DDR 3 ECC Ram
2x 147GB SAS in Raid 1
3 x 640 GB Fusion IO drives in Raid 0 (yes, Raid 0 - they NEED the IO)

That's gonna be a SQL server .. one out of many mind you

I think I just drooled all over my desk ... Those Fusion IO cards alone are $10k each ...

Thats a lot of server - what brand?

jibbajabba

it_consultant wrote: »

Thats a lot of server - what brand?

Supermicro

jibbajabba

phoeneous wrote: »

Even for smaller databases, say under 5GB?

Doesn't matter how big the database is tbh. Even a small database could run 100s of queries in a short period of time ...

it_consultant

Gomjaba wrote: »

Supermicro

Really? THAT normally sends alarm bells off in my head, not the configuration of the disks / RAID.

Gomjaba wrote: »

Doesn't matter how big the database is tbh. Even a small database could run 100s of queries in a short period of time ...

I have seen a fair share of databases running on RAID 5 without issue, even busy Oracle servers. I haven't seen a time when there was a performance issue and it was determined that the RAID configuration was to blame. If the money is available then I usually go RAID 10 for the performance and redundancy aspects. I had a server room flood and (of course the tape backups hadn't run in ages) and if they had been RAID 5 or 0 they would have been totally screwed.

I'm not crapping on anyone's RAID decisions, MS says its fine to run your prod databases on non-redundant disks where the applications are in a high availability configuration. In fact all of MS' hosted services run on non-redundant disks.

Forsaken_GA

phoeneous wrote: »

Even for smaller databases, say under 5GB?

If the database is getting alot of writes, then yes. RAID5 doesn't have a problem with reads. The problem comes on writes, because of the parity information. The parity calculation and the extra write of the parity information kills write performance. And it has to be done for *every* write, no matter what size it is.

jibbajabba

Well I am not arguing the raid config here .... When people spend nearly $100k on a single server they tend to know what they are doing ...

Turgon

Gomjaba wrote: »

Well I am not arguing the raid config here .... When people spend nearly $100k on a single server they tend to know what they are doing ...

They should do yes. I imagine there has been some consultation on these matters and a decision reached. The guys are simply putting some opinions out there. You could ask about the rationale at work if you are curious. If everyone draws a blank offer some questions. On the other hand if a corporate designer comes at you who has been looking at this for months avoid the car crash. Simply read whatever design documentation has been published internally and most likely has his name on it. Costs will obviously have been a factor as on a project of this size they add up.

jibbajabba

Company is a customer of ours for 10+ years and they are in the business for much longer than that. The 'problem' is simply that I cannot go into details but it surely is awesome to 'play' with server such as this

All I am saying is, not everything is black and White when it comes to specifics such as Raid

it_consultant

People tend to do what the know or do something based on a defining experience - like me with RAID 10. It certainly doesn't mean other configurations aren't valid and possibly superior.

Reminds me of when I got into it with a property management software consultant because I set up RAID 10 when he said RAID 1. I was like "for a property of 100 rooms I think we are going to be OK".