[Gllug] Hardware recommendation, esp. SANs and shared storage

[Matthew Kirkwood]

Hi,

We're looking to put together some fairly hefty Oracle
servers, initially configured as primary and standby, but
ultimately we're planning to go the real application
clustering route, as the business people think load could
quadruple in a year, and the finance people believe them
:-)

There was some discussion on this list a while back about
external storage.  Someone mentioned a company based in
Wimbledon who do beige-box fibrechannel storage, but I
can't find it in the archive.  We need at least a terabyte
available (probably in a mix of RAID 5 and 0+1), ideally
in a chassis with room to double that.

Because of the RAC architecture and the requirement to go
beyond 2 DB servers sometime, NAS and shared SCSI are not
an option.

Similarly, anyone have experience with new, chunky (4-8
CPUs, 4-16Gb RAM) hardware from the usual Big Names?  It
looks like Dell offer the best bang per buck, and with
pretty current hardware, but two of our guys have horror
stories about Dell support.

Any opinions or experiences on any of the above most
gratefully received.

Thanks,
Matthew
- currently trying to convince Oracle reseller that
  a 4-way P4 with hyperthreading is only 4 CPUs for
  licencing purposes :-)


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