Hardware recommendation for Solaris 10 + ZFS data warehouse server

Question

The server would run a 2 drive (mirrored root pool for OS and master database segment). And would run individual zpools for each remaining drive (loss of data is acceptable).

Initial requirements would be:

• 2x 7540 xeons (6 core)
• 32gig memory.
• 12 drives.

A 4U/2U server (6/8 core and 2/4 sockets cpu support) with internal disks / or external JBOD. Capacity to house a disk per CPU core is important.

Answer 1

Buying x7540 processors is an absurd investment. A dual E5620 will be cheaper and still very fast. If you must use six-core processors, the X5650 is cheaper, though will be limited to only 2 per motherboard.

There are 2U chassis which will fit 12 3.5" drives, but if you want even more spindles, there are 2U chassis which will fit 24 2.5" drives, hotswap.

Answer 2

If you want to run Solaris is gonna have to Sun (or Dell) hardware since Oracle no longer sells Solaris 10 licenses/support contracts for generic hardware.

Sun Fire X4450 (2U) + Sun J4400 JBOD (6U).

• 2U Quad Socket, Six Core Xeon 7400 Series (24 Cores)
• 8 x 2.5in Drives (x4450) + 24 x 3.5 Drives (J4400)
• 32 DIMM slots, Max 256GB RAM
• 4 port GigE, 2 PCIe x8 & 4 PCIe x4 slots

But if 24cores/drives in 8U is overkill for your needs, sun makes an 8 core, 16 drive, 2U Server (Sun Fire X4270), but only with 2.5inch drives. Since data loss is acceptable, run 2 striped drives per core to make up for the fact that 2.5inch disks only go up to 500GB a piece.

• Dual Socket, Quad Core Xeon 5500 Series
• 8TB Max: 16 x 2.5in SAS or SATA drives
• 18 DIMM slots, Max 144GB RAM
• 4 port GigE, 6 PCIe x8 slots

I don't know what your requirements are, but if you're willing to step away from the 1 spindle 1 core mindset you should evaluate an SSD equipped Sun 7310/7410 unified storage box. It would probably meet your IO needs for multiple 8-12 core frontends and scales up to six J4400 JOBDs with commodity 1TB SATA disks.