New database Server: What hardware specification?

[kenny chia]

Hi all
I intend to setup a new Oracle 9i database either in Red Hat or HP-UX.
How do I determine the server specs required?
for example
1) Disk space required
2) Disk array type
3) CPU speed
4) Number of CPUs

Any reference to good web site or books will be welcomed too....

[Tim D Fulford]

A good question.. generally it comes down to how much cash do you have to splash.

for CPU specs, www.tpc.org though I do find that it is far from comprehensive. that said, you can usually get an idea of what most systems can do.

For disks subsystems. Space you really nead to figure out yourself. I do not know of ANYTHING like tpc for storage performance... That said my personal favorite measures from the glossy brouchures or the most helpful pre-sales guys are
o max IO rate (to cache if applicable) NOT bandwidth (MB/s) but throughput (IO/s)
o read IO/s, NO CACHING + how many disks at 8k block

You can deduce a "standard" cached OLTP performance by assuming that
- 100% write caching
- 0% read caching
- 60:40 split read:write
so say a system does 100,000 IO/s cached reads/writes. 5,000 no cache reads

so total IO/s will be 1/(.6/5000 + .4/100000) ==> 8065 IO/s.

This will be a ball park figre. On the one hand it will be a bit conservative as you hope to have some cached reads.. But the glossy brouchers tend to use 512k IO/s for the 100% cached IO rate, so the 100,000 figure will be too high. Also back-end (mirrored) writes can slow things down (e.g. 5000 IO reads are equivalent to say 3000 IO writes that are mirrored back-end) so it will be just a ball park figure (of a guess of some assumptions, you get the idea). If you know your caching and read:write ratios then you can be more accurate with your inputs.

Good luck with the challange.

Tim

[Lee Harris_1]

Tim is right here, this probably really comes down to a question of budget. I think the rule of thumb is buy the highest spec hardware with the cash you've got. Even if this may seem like overkill initially, you give yourself some headroom for scalability of your database/apps.

A couple of other things you might want to take into consideration are the number of users accessing the system which is built on the database, and whether or not there will be a separate application server. You might want to consider a storage area network for holding your Oracle filesystems too.

Regards - Lee

[Joseph Loo]

hi,

u may like to refer to the attached Oracle Metalink docs which answered the questions and more on what u r looking for.

take note that the doc is only minimum requirements.

regards.

[Steven E. Protter]

Take your Oracle metalink document and overengineer it.

The key factors you don't reveal is how many simultaneous users you plan for your database.

Factors to think about:

Oracle's license fee is $40,000 per CPU. That means if you add cpu's your license fee goes up. That makes the more powerful PA-RISC solution attractive, more oracle for the buck.

1) Disk space is the required amount for the binaries plus the data. Only you can say how much data you have.

2) Oracle recommends raid 1 for data raid 10 for redo logs and such. Everything else can be raid 5 but there is a speed bump for that.

3) CPU speed. Not much choice here. Oracle will no longer install on a machine outside its cpu specs, the metalink doc is good for that.

4) Addressed earlier. As few as possible to do the job and minimize license fees, unless cost is not a factor.

SEP

[Ravi_8]

Hi,

I prefer using HP-UX rather than RH because of it's stability.

1. Disk space depends on number of instances that you are planned. we have 36GB disks with 3 instances running.

2. if you intend to use in clustered environment array is required else not

3. HP machines available speed (650 or 750 MHz) should be sufficient.

4. 1 CPU for 1-2 instances, 2 CPU for more instances is ideal