Quotes from John Stoffel
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.
Yes, this is quite important since I live near Worcester and the DC is in Medford.
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.
I thought about clustering the database but its about 80G in size with a big projected growth (around 125G this time next year). The 5.0 current clustering technology uses in memory storage making this almost unfeasible (I did price out some hardware to do this but it was a bit beyond my budget). MySQL 5.1 has started to use disk based storage for pieces of the tables but its still Beta. Aside from that limitation we are still on a 4.1 release and I'd rather separate an OS change and a DB change into two phases.
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.
Since I posted this, I have looked at the Opteron 4X00 series and I am leaning towards them as machines for this project because of the price and the fact that if Solaris x86 does not work out I can run Linux on them :)
Another vendor would be Rackable Computing, they have BIOS access over serial and it works well.
I'll check them out.
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.
OS drives are always mirrored in our machines and part of the upgrade will be new RAID disk arrays.
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.
Thanks for the vote of confidence on giving Solaris x86 a try, I'll let you know how it turns out.
John
Thanks to all who contributed to this thread (or do in the future) -John