asked
Idea about DELL CX 300
Hi I just spoken to Dell Tech Dept regarding about our servers and they can't give me a good reason why I should use CX 300. May be your guys does know more then they know about our SQL Database with CX300. Currently we have Dell Server PE2850 which is connecting to CX 300 through Fibre Channel x 2 for one of our SQL Production Databases. We have replacement server Dell PE R710 which will swap with PE2850 and new server will connect to CX 300 by using Fibre Channel again. I have asked Dell about the performance - Questions is Shall I use CX 300 along with PEr710 for our production environment? or Shall I take out CX 300 completely and use only PEr710?? Becasue PEr710 is quite new and it can give me great performance . CX 300 is couple of years old and it might gave me slow performance after I connect from new Server. New server got SAS drives, 24GB of RAM and Xeon proc (16core) and it has enough space for all databases which used to sit on CX 300. CX 300 with PEr710 or Just PEr710 itself? Any Idea? Thanks. Leo
CX300 with your R710, as long as: - Your CX300 is populated with reasonable disks (i.e. SAS, 10K or faster, enough spindles) - Your CX300 is still going to be within warranty at the end of the expected life of the system, or you can purchase extended warranty to cover the time - You have reasonable fibre channel connectivity installed in the R710 - Your CX300 is fully redundant (i.e. two power supplies, two controllers) - You are using clustering (and I suspect this one is going to be a 'no') My question to you, though, is why would you use only one R710? When speccing up servers, I would always make sure everything was fully redundant. I.e. 2 servers, 2 network switches, 2 power supplies in *everything*, two network paths, two fibre channel switches, two controllers in the SAN. That sort of config paid for itself a few times over in terms of not missing SLAs due to hardware issues. If you are not using clustering, then you will get little benefit from connecting to a SAN whether it's by FC or iSCSI - you may as well just use local disks, as long as they are on a par, performance wise, with those from the SAN. I mean the CX300 is 3U and supports 15 3.5" drives, whereas the R710 is only 2U and so only supports 6, or 8 drives if you're using the 2.5" variety. So you have to consider future upgrade potential. But if you're now replacing a 2 year old 2850, then that's probably not much cause for concern for you...
Well, clustering for high availability requires two machines running in tandem. It's not really something I can explain in a comment, do some research on 'setting up windows failover clustering' and you'll get the idea.
