[Wlug] MySQL Server Hardware

[John Stoffel]

>>>>> "IV" == IV John Westcott <John.Westcott at tufts.edu> writes:

IV>   I work in a place that has traditionally used Sun Sparc hardware 
IV> running Solaris to host a production MySQL environment.
IV>   We are going to be replacing our database servers this year and I am 
IV> trying to determine if I want to maintain the norm or if I want to try 
IV> to change.

IV>   I am interested to see what other people use for hardware/OS for
IV> a production MySQL installation that requires a high amount of
IV> uptime.

Well, the nice thing I like about Sun hardware is that you have remote
serial console access all the way down to the BIOS.  This, to me, is a
key issue in supporting any critical system.  This way I don't have to
drive into the data center to fix things if at all possible.

Second, in your case you might want to think about a MySQL cluster if
you have lots of stringent uptime requirements, but it's not clear
what kind of downtime you can handle.

You might want to look at the new Sun Opteron X4x000 boxes, they're
cheaper and faster than Sparc, but come with the nice remote
management features that I find indispensable.

Another vendor would be Rackable Computing, they have BIOS access over
serial and it works well.  

Again, not knowing your system loads, I'd say that any AMD Opteron box
with plenty of memory would be just fine for you.  In this case, the
more memory the better, and of course having fast local disks in a
RAID setup is also key.  Mirroring the OS and data disks is key here
to long life.

Oh yeah, moving to Solaris in X86 might also help in this transition,
in that you get more bang for the buck, but don't have a complete
issue with re-training and finding new tools to do what you want.
Solaris 10 on x86 is pretty neat.  

John