Re: Simplest way to plug disks on a Netra x1
- From: "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilbert88@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2006 23:45:12 -0400
Tim Bradshaw wrote:
On 2006-08-19 01:57:49 +0100, "Richard B. Gilbert" <rgilbert88@xxxxxxxxxxx> said:
"Serious" hardware is available for far less than "thousands of pounds".
I meant the HW you might want to run a production system on, which probably isn't something 6 years old you bought of Ebay.
If you don't insist on new, state-of-the-art, hardware you can get "Enterprise" hardware for hundreds of dollars. See, for example:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Sun-Enterprise-250-E250-Server-in-Good-Condition_W0QQitemZ260020662136QQihZ016QQcategoryZ1484QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
which
is an auction for an Enterprise 250 currently going for GBP 150.
There's an Enterprise 4000 going for $200 US.
Both of these (especially the E4k) are large, hot, noisy machines. Not the sort of thing you want sitting in your back room or by your desk, and not the sort of thing people will really appreciate putting in a DC environment while you play with them (well, not the sort of thing I'd appreciate). An X1 is a 1u box, which is (relatively) quiet, cheap to run, and which can easily be found space for.
By the way, that E250 has *no* disks and they don't say what the memory or processor config is, but I bet the answer is `small'. Things like 3500s / 400s are probably just as cheap as an E250, even with memory & some small disks, but that's because no one wants something that hot, slow and noisy any more. If you look you'll notice that the 1u boxes keep their value rather well cf the huge machines, and that's exactly because they're useful for things like this. A few weeks ago there was a non-trivial SF 4800 config for sale on ebay (12CPU? & enough memory, though probably no storage) for something like 5k. But who would *want* it?
The best way to learn Oracle might just be to "do it right"! Having the hardware that allows doing it right allows you to compare the behavior of the recommended layout versus the "low budget" two disk layout. (Assuming that you can generate a "realistic" load.)
Of course before doing a real deployment you want to test on semi-realistic hardware (I have more-or-less quit jobs because people refused to fund reasonable dev/qa environments, meaning that most testing was done on the live system, with resulting appalling business risks), but before that there's a stage where you want to find out how to drive the installer, what patches you need, how to write scripts to drive the system, what the commands are, blah blah. That stuff just does not need huge iron in most cases (Cluster software is often an exception because you need the fibre disks etc).
I mean, really: I deal with big machines & enterprise software, but I've got an X1 (playing with zones and ZFS), an ultra 2 with an antique FC array (VxVM etc), and some U5s (Oracle, general playing) in front of me. The only unusual thing about them all is that they have memory configs which would have been considered very large when they were current production kit (and I suppose large IDE disks in some of them). All these machines are useful for learning stuff or have been in the relatively recent past. To argue otherwise is, frankly, just silly.
--tim
The Netras don't appear to support a CD/DVD drive. That means a network install which, in turn, requires a "real" system acting as a server. A Netra would make a great second machine but hardly a great first machine.
I have a small collection of Ultra 10s myself; I bought them in order to be able to set up NIS and NFS servers and clients and practice stuff I had learned in a Sysadmin course I took about three years ago. I used the "biggest" Ultra 10 to install Solaris 10 a few weeks ago.
If I had a choice between learning Oracle on a Netra or on an Ultra 10, I'd use the Ultra 10. Two of mine have SCSI cards installed and I have enough small SCSI disks (2GB-4GB) lying around that I could install Oracle and set up a small database using the recommended layout.
.
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