We are also looking at going the Opteron route for our new DB servers. We have found that the true CPU usage isn't the problem. It's disk IO, we are exploring different types of RAID levels and different interfaces. I'm rather intrigued by Serial Attached Scsi. The price is rather high for 15k 73gb drives, but might be a good fix to our IOwait issues when paired with RAID 10. I just can't trust SATA for mission critical data such as DB servers yet. We might do RAID5 with SATA on our web servers though.


I've found it always best to email perspective hosts, and ask if they can special order certain parts I want in. They might not list them on their site, but most hosts can have things drop shipped.

SATA isn't a problem IMO, as long as you go with a reputable manufacturer - i.e don't use the onboard stuff, as its usually pants (not that any one here would do anyway, I'm sure). Adaptec do some SATA stuff now as well as SCSI. If it were my choice (and not the hosting companies), I may well look seriously into the SATA route. One area you may well loose out on could be SCSI features, although SATA now has NCQ to mention one. Anyway, I wouldn't rule it out quite so fast.

As for above - yeah, it was a question I had when I was trying to determine the reason behind the load. Although the mySQL server gets hit like hell, the load indicator showed it was the CPU which was the limiting factor as the CPU load would normally reach high 90s during really heavy times and then the RAM would get exhausted because it wasn't processing requests quickly enough and then swap file came into use, made everything a million times worse and... well, I'm sure you all know the rest of the story! ;)

To answer the question above - mine is hosted at Positive Internet in the UK (www.positive-internet.com), they aren't cheap, but you do get what you pay for. First class (and I cannot fault them at all) support & assitance. They've gone above and beyond the call of duty so many times I've started handing out medals.

rusko.us gave me a rather decent quote on some opteron machines a ways back. WHT is also a good place to look for specials with opterons, and they do have a host finder thingamajig that allows you to specify opterons in the options, I believe.

We are currently using (2) Dual Xeon Servers. 1 for Web and the other for data base. Both have (2) 73gig 10k SCSI HDs, but not raid. We've been taxing and maxing them for the last few months and use EV1.

Later this month I will be purchasing (not leasing) Opteron 270 powered servers. I'm hopefully going to be contracting the server godfather here sometime soon to have a look and let us know exactly what we need, but no matter what it is going to be Opteron. I've studied them up and down and there is little (if anything) that can dispute the Opterons dominance in the server market over Xeons of today (and especially yesterday). My xeons have performed pretty well but with Opterons prices being cut almost in half and their history of excellent performance over the past few years, there is no question in my mind what we're going to now.

I have also studied up on SATA drives, and while they are fast (especially the raptors) in single user environments, they are still a good ways behind scsi in heavy I/O situations such as data base operations. We're going with a top of the line SCSI RAID card and u320 15k RPM hard drives, most likely running RAID 10 for the database. We'll probably use SATA Raptors for the web server running RAID 1. Both will have 2x Opteron 270 dual cores and plenty of RAM. Still undecided on using a Supermicro or Tyan Thunder mother boards..

We will save a pretty nice chunk of change on monthly hosting expenses going from leased dedicated to COLO'ing. I am in Houston but I can't find a colo facility down here that won't end up nailing us on bandwidth fees so I am thinking we are going to colo at www.dedicatednow.com . They give you 2,000 Gigs a month using a 1u/2u or mini-tower server for $99/mo plus different management plans if you want them to handle that type of thing in house. As we grow, we can keep adding servers as needed. I'm really tired of leasing servers and will be happy to purchase our own where I know the history of the equipment (we've had two hard drives go bad in the last 4 months on the same server) and it doesn't cost us a huge amount of money each month to have really powerful machines. If we want more RAM, we pay once rather than a setup fee and then a monthly.

There's some nice colo places in Texas, though, most are in Dallas.

http://cologuys.com is in Dallas, and has reasonable prices. They host some of the larger webcomics out there.
http://colo4dallas.com/ is very good, but expensive.
http://www.layeredtech.com/ can get you colo at the Savvis datacenter, however, you have to contact them to get a price quote.
http://www.theplanet.com/ also has colo, but same story as LT on pricing.


There's also a lot of companies in the Infomart who offer colo, more than I can list here.

I talked to Layeredtech re: the Savvis data center but they were not very interested in COLO'ing unless you get a 1/2 or full rack, if memory serves. I need 2 max at the moment but will likely be expanding soon.

Thanks for the info

I take that back. We may be moving to one in a few weeks.

I'm going with www.softlayer.com for my Opterons. They're new, but I've talked extensively with them, and I believe they can do the right thing for me. And they're going to be introducing load-balancing options in about 2 weeks.

My board isnt 'huge' but still large enough (800mb db), we've been running dual 246's and "toying" with the idea of upgrading to 275's. Current server built off a Tyan Thunder K8SR (S2881).

Instead of that I might just build a DB server when it comes to upgrade and use top end dual core opterons for that and set up a SCSI RAID the way I really would like to for the DB instead of the SATA RAID that we currently use.

Colo in Michigan with a friend - works out very well. 2 1000mbit bonded and attached to two different switches.

i use my dual opteron 246 with raid and 2gig ram with www.dedicatednow.com , good support.