blades and database servers

If you're running Oracle, with the right SAN and host OS, you can use Oracle RAC and scale like crazy.  SQL 2000 had only limited support for SANs which makes it the better choice for directly attached storage, however, many of the SAN vendors had work-arounds.  SQL 2005 improved that but for sheer scalability, Oracle is still the winner.

 

The SAN can allow you to virtualize your storage and combine multiple drives and RAID policies to get better than single-drive performance.  The can also have larger caches to allow your database indexes to reside in memory instead of on disk.

 

All of this depends on how big your database and processing requirements are.  Realize that moving from the 6600 to blades and a SAN will involve significant expense.  Also, don't forget to consider the environmental impact of a blade cabinet.  They can really put out the heat and draw lots of power.

I was at a client who had a monster (Terabyte) configuration using another vendor's blades, Fibre Channel fabric controller, and multiple SANs with all kinds of storage.  The database blades were all 64bit running Unix.  The blade chassis had a mix of SAN interfaces but most were 4Gb.

 

I have more than 41Gb on my laptop. :smileyhappy:

 

In this case, you might be better off with a 4U Dual/Quad server with Quad Xeons, a chunk of RAM, and 5x146 15k RPM drives.  Configure 2 drives as the system mirror.  If you get a server with a split backplane, you could put the system and indexes on the 2x146Gb mirror and the data on a 3x146Gb RAID-5.  Use blades for applications.  If you don't have much of an application, you might even be able to get away with not having a SAN.  Just put drives directly on the blade cards.

 

I'll preface this by the fact that I don't know anything about Pervasive.SQL 8.6 so your mileage may vary.  I'd also avoid virtualization for the database.

Yeah, this is definitely a small database.  =)

 

But it's very important information, holding healthcare information.  I guess you could say that because of that, I'm intimidated by the thought of changing things around to a different setup, but I think that's what we might have to do.

 

We have other systems coming in that need rack space, and we just don't have it right now.  There isn't a spare U on our rack as it is, and there's no room for another rack in the room.  Moving all of our applications to the blades doesn't free up enough space, so we want to move the database servers as well.

 

It's good to hear that bigger database implementations out there work with blades.  Thanks for the info. and the advice.