lo there all,
our company is running a dell 2.8 ghz p4 with 1 gig of ram. We have been getting lots of traffic of late, and lots of work for our MySQL engine. So, the boss wants to upgrade our hardware. Now, what we have been looking at is a dual core, dual cpu with RAID 5, 4 gig of RAM, and SCSI drives ( at 15000rpm ).
Now, much of this is new to me, and i am the company alpha-geek, so i need some info before i make a reccomendation.

First off, the unit will run ubuntu edgy, MySQL, apache and rails. Should be no problem, and i know i will have to read up on how to set up RAID. Tis ok. But what i need to know is what advantage we will get out of the processors being set up like this.

If i have a dual core, dual processor running at 2ghz, is that roughly the same as having an 8 ghz machine ? i know the jump in RAM will be a performance boost, but i dont know how much extra performance we will get out of our drives being that much faster.

So i guess my main question is, from your experience out there, is this a big upgrade, ( because it is an expensive one ) ? Is there any gotchas out there i need to be aware of ? And, are there any good how-to's for a newbie to get info on what advantages one configuration of hardware has over another ? And, how to set something like this up.

If you have read this far, thanks for your time.

Four 2 GHz processors will not equal 8 GHz. You will just notice better performance with Apache. Apache is a multi-threaded service. Apache will run very well if you give it 64 processors. MySQL is different because it depends on the processor cache and processor speed if running a lot of queries.

Your chosen RAID scheme is ok, but it can be done better. I suggest storing the OS on a RAID-1 array. Then use two 3ware 8-port or 12-port SATA controllers. Setup RAID-5 on the 3ware controllers and then combine them in a RAID-1 using Linux software RAID. This will create RAID-15 which will provide you better performance for serving web pages and handling databases. The SATA hard drives that I suggest using is Western Digital 'Raptor' 74 GB. These have lowest accessing times compared to other SATA hard drives, they perform as well as SCSI hard drives, and they perform well for servers. I suggest providing hot spares on each of the RAID-5 controllers.

The least costly way is using three RAID-1 arrays. One is for the OS, the second is for storing web pages and last is for MySQL. For MySQL, I suggest either RAID-1 or RAID-10 depending on size of the database.

RAID-1 actually handles nth amount of read tasks. The amount of read tasks depends on the amount of hard drives in an RAID-1 array. Though it can only write one task at a time.

RAID-5 handles nth amount of write tasks. The amount of write tasks depends on the amount of hard drives. Though it can only handle one read task at a time.

RAID-15 combines both RAID-1 and RAID-5 together to get the best of two worlds. This uses two RAID-5 arrays that gets mirrored. It is very, very redundant and it is costly.

Go to for an article on Quad Intel Xeon MP versus AMD Quad Opteron.
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2872&p=1

Hey, thanks for all of the info and the link. Our largest DB table is 1.6 gig. Not much by enterprise standards, but large enough to put a serious drag on the simple desktop system we are using now.

I appreciate all of this.

I think that DBtable like that really need not only big server w/ at least more than 2 gig ram to store all but olso it need faultless db soft
visit oracle
Please help me at: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=508377

IMHO, scsi drives, although not as large and more expensive, are what you want for a commercial server. The raid arrays may also be hardware raid, and running on a true bus, won't load down the processor. They will also probably be hotswappable. If you get an indicator saying a drive is offline, you can first simply reseat the drive. If that doesn't work because the drive is truly faulty, swap it with a spare without even having to log into the server. I've read that SCSI drives are more durable for raid arrays as well.

SATA drives are starting to appear in Commercial servers as well. I recently purchased a Dell Server and MD1000 SAS RAID enclosure. the SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) Enclosure can be setup to accept either SAS Drives or SATA Drives. Either way it's hot swap, but the SATA Drives are obviously a lot less expensive.. The array with 1 TB of SATA Storage in a RAID 10 configuration was around $4k. A 2 TB configuration in a RAID 5 with a Hotspare is about the same cost..

The Server config is similar to what the OP listed.. 2 dual core Xeons 4 GB of RAM and RAID 1 using the internal PERC SCSI controller for the OS. Server and external SAS array was about 10K combined.

I must say with our Database moved to this system it is much more responsive than on the old server. A DB backup or restore of a ~ 7GB database takes only a couple minutes now, where before it took over 15 Minutes to do either.

I suggest perusing the Dell Linux sites for specific Distro and RAID controller information.
Dell Linux Offerings

Dell and MySQL Alliance _2_

Dell Linux RAID and Storage

The new PERC 5 RAID controllers use SAS (Serial Attached SCSI), and a new driver, megaraid_sas. The new SAS 5 non-RAID controllers use a new driver, mptsas, part of the mptfusion driver family. Both drivers are included in kernel.org 2.6.x kernels


Dell Linux Distributions

Best of luck to ya !!