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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> RE: hardware specification
Paul - If someone posts a concise reply, I think that many of us would be
interested. You have listed most of the relevant factors. Fortunately, in
most situations, you try to factor in some future growth, so you end up
buying a box that has somewhat more capacity than you think you'll need, so
that may save you from problems.
If you are purchasing software, usually your vendor can give you some ideas. And if they steer you wrong, you can blame it on them. But don't take their pre-sales information at face value. They realize that you are comparing them to other vendors and if they put too much "truth" in their specifications, you just might buy from their competitor.
If you are custom-developing software, then everything gets much more variable. You may have performance problems on a properly sized system, just due to some bad decisions by developers. Or maybe, heaven forbid, from some bad advice you gave the developers. Just kidding. Seriously, the Oracle tuning manual offers some methods to take custom software in test and predict the hardware that will be needed when you scale it up to production.
We are in a situation like this right now. We have had Compaq Tru64s for many years, and we have a rough feel for what that platform is capable of. Now we are buying Sun Solaris systems, and so we are at sea.
Two other factors prevent this from becoming a fixed science, like maybe civil engineers building sewers. First, the hardware keeps evolving at a rapid pace. The hardware you bought last year is obsolete this year. If you wrote the book this year, it would be obsolete next year. Second, there are many complex decisions to make. CPUs - how many, how fast. Memory - how much, how fast. Disk - don't even get me started. Direct attached, vs. NAS vs. SAN. Hardware RAID vs. software RAID.
And frankly, hardware is so much of a commodity that nobody is going to spend much effort helping you because you'll just end up buying the cheapest hardware in the end. It was somewhat different years ago. Proprietary vendors had enough margin that they could afford to really help you spec a system out properly. But with cheap hardware you can just purchase a margin of safety.
I did have the opportunity several years ago to work on a project that was the largest Unix-based database system in the world at the time. Both Oracle and Sun trotted out their best experts because it was a showcase system for them both. It was a real experience.
Do your research, write your book, and I promise to buy a copy.
Dennis Williams
DBA
Lifetouch, Inc.
dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Thursday, May 09, 2002 10:19 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
I'm re-posting this question because the original post was on a weekend and I think it got lost in the Monday morning deluge.
I'm looking for procedures with which to specify hardware requirements for a database server. Based on number of users, frequency of access, size of database, etc., how can I go about deciding how many CPUs, how much memory, I/O bandwith, etc.? Any tips or pointers to books, etc. will be welcome.
TIA,
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Fat City Network Services -- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California -- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists --------------------------------------------------------------------To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). Received on Thu May 09 2002 - 11:13:33 CDT
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