[linux-elitists] RE: phasing out Solaris/Oracle/Netscape with Linux/PostgreSQL/Apa che

[Kurt Seifried]

IDE/SCSI RAID:

There are now IDE raid cards comparable to SCSI cards (in functionality/onboard
ram/features/etc). Of course this wasn't always the case, software raid works
but is generally a lot slower for writes, OTOH I have seen some tests where
software raid did faster reads, go fig. Linux journal has numerous ads for these
products. Some allow you to hot swap IDE drives (i.e. if one dies in a RAID 1/5
configuration) you can simply pop it out and pop a new one in (and the data gets
rebuilt/yadayada).

Of course you might be better off buying a disk appliance (such as something
from raidzone.com) with a 100meg/gigabit interface and let it do all the disk
related stuff. Plus you can more easily fail over to another server (or possibly
use more then one if disk IO is not the bottleneck).

Throughput:

This is a sticky point. UltraSparc's have massive buses, and while PCI is pretty
good, even 64 bit PCI on a high end Intel/AMD doesn't compared to midrange
UltraSparc workstations (course these workstations cost a packet). Realistically
however for most people a decent PC will work, you may want to go for something
high end like a dual Athalon with whatever the latest memory shtick is being
sold (current DDR I believe). www.2cpu.com has reviews/etc, the boards should be
available shortly.

As for the database, Oracle has lots of features, MySQL is fast though, stripped
down but has most features people need, you mentioned the data was mostly static
so it should work for you. The CGI issue has way to many variables, perl, with
mod_perl, without, C, etc, etc. There's probably more then one way to do it
"correctly". If the database is static you may want to cache results, assuming
people do the same queries multiple times (and depending on how big the results
are).

Something to consider is going with a non intel platform, Apple has some
gorgeous dual CPU G4's with 64 bit PCI slots that support a ton of ram, might be
worth considering (they aren't to expensive). Just make sure you look it in a
closet since Apple's OpenFirmware doesn't support setting a password to get
access to the Open Firmware =(.

Kurt Seifried, seifried at securityportal.com
Securityportal - your focal point for security on the 'net