"IV" == IV John Westcott <John.Westcott@tufts.edu> writes:
IV> I work in a place that has traditionally used Sun Sparc hardware IV> running Solaris to host a production MySQL environment. IV> We are going to be replacing our database servers this year and I am IV> trying to determine if I want to maintain the norm or if I want to try IV> to change. IV> I am interested to see what other people use for hardware/OS for IV> a production MySQL installation that requires a high amount of IV> uptime. Well, the nice thing I like about Sun hardware is that you have remote serial console access all the way down to the BIOS. This, to me, is a key issue in supporting any critical system. This way I don't have to drive into the data center to fix things if at all possible. Second, in your case you might want to think about a MySQL cluster if you have lots of stringent uptime requirements, but it's not clear what kind of downtime you can handle. You might want to look at the new Sun Opteron X4x000 boxes, they're cheaper and faster than Sparc, but come with the nice remote management features that I find indispensable. Another vendor would be Rackable Computing, they have BIOS access over serial and it works well. Again, not knowing your system loads, I'd say that any AMD Opteron box with plenty of memory would be just fine for you. In this case, the more memory the better, and of course having fast local disks in a RAID setup is also key. Mirroring the OS and data disks is key here to long life. Oh yeah, moving to Solaris in X86 might also help in this transition, in that you get more bang for the buck, but don't have a complete issue with re-training and finding new tools to do what you want. Solaris 10 on x86 is pretty neat. John