Best MySQL Server Under $10K?
Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
Updated: January 4th, 2009
I want to get opinions from outside of my daily circle of people on the best server hardware to use for MySQL. I remember from the conference somebody (Pipes?) mentioning a particular Dell server with multiple disk RAID10 that could supposedly be had for about $6k but I completely misplaced the model number (Frank, did you get my email?).
I know that a multi-disk RAID array with a bunch of fast disks (15k RPM?) is probably the most important method of improving performance, followed by the amount of RAM, so I'm trying to find the best combination/balance of the two. However, server prices on the Internet range so much that I don't even know where to begin to tell a good deal from a bad one. I don't think SSDs can play a role here, because we need at least 200GB of usable space per machine. For comparison, we currently use the following spec: Dual quadcore Intel, 16GB RAM, 200GB RAID1 + 1TB RAID1 using SATA drives (eww?) in a 2U rack (a bit too chunky, isn't it?) made by Zantaz. It performs quite nicely but I think it chokes on the amount of writes way too early.
So, what does everyone think the best configuration is under $10,000? Bonus points if you can provide a link to the vendor site or at least a model number!
- RakX 2U chassis
- 2x Intel Xeon E5420 Quad-core 2.5Ghz, 12MB cache CPUs
- 32GB (16x 2GB) 667Mhz Fully Buffered RAM
- 2x integrated gbit NICs
- IPMI 2.0 remote management card with KVM over LAN
- 3Ware 9690SA-4I RAID controller with 512MB cache and battery backup
- 12x 74GB Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 15KRPM SAS drives
- redundant 700W power supply
- sliding rail kit
- 5 year advance component exchange warranty
- OS RAID: 73GB HW RAID1
- DATA RAID: 365GB HW RAID10
Total price: $6176 + tax, free shipping.
Central Room of Potatoes
Thursday, March 13th, 2008
Today Travis was messing around with a Chinese site blinkx has indexed a short while ago http://www.tudou.com and saw a cryptic error message that started coming up on all pages. The message looked something like this:
各位土豆:
为了给大家提供更好的服务,我们正在搬迁扩建土豆的中心机房。
3月14日凌晨0:00 ~ 夜间24:00,我们的服务暂停24小时。
3月15日凌晨0:00 新机房就搬迁完成了,土豆会准时回家。
Now, neither Travis nor I know the language of Chinese, so what do we do? Go to Google Translate, of course. Here's what Google Translate produced:
That's:
Members potatoes:
In order to provide you with better service, we are expanding the relocation of the central room of potatoes.
March 14 at 0:00 to 24:00 at night, our services will be suspended for 24 hours.
March 15 at 0:00 new room on the relocation is complete, potatoes will be time to go home.
No wonder the servers went down, being powered by potatoes from a central room of potatoes and all. I guess expanding to a larger room of even more potatoes was the only way out.

(1 rating, 1 votes)

beer planet is Artem Russakovskii's blog. Artem is a software engineer at