Re: Recommandations on hardware for informix wanted

Recommendations on hardware for informix wanted Meg, 29-Jun-94 I could advise you and say, that you have to bye Data General machines, because that is exactly what we did after a very careful and expensive evaluation of servers for Informix OnLine. Instead you could do the following: 1) Find out what your musts and wants are and put a weight factor on your wants. (This factor will be used later). 2) Write letters to your hardware vendors and let them send you an offer. Let them tell you how they will solve your hardware problem. 3) Evaluate on paper all the offers. Send all offers, which does not meet your musts to /dev/null. 4) Compare all offers for each want you have and give the the best offer the highest number of points. Then multiply the points with your weight factor and for each offer you have the total score for each of your wants. 5) For each offer add all the "Total scores" you calculated for the wants. 6) Select the 3 top scoring offers. 7) Make a practical benchmark on the 3 top scoring vendors. This benchmark will tell you a lot. How will this machine perform ? Can you speak with this vendors technical experts ? When the they cant solve a problem, can they talk with support people in the company and solve the problem fast ? (You might think they can, but practice may show you another picture). You can also get a picture on the servers reliability. 8) Select your new hardware vendor. This seems to be a lot of work and it is. It will also cost you a lot of money before you select a hardware vendor, but you might get into big problems if you are not very careful. I can say, that we did the evaluation very careful and today we are happy that we did it this way. Data General scored very fine in the evaluation. They did not get the highest score in every test, but at the bottom line there was no doubt at all. I can strongly recommand DG, but you have to check, that they meet your musts. Maybe DG will be a bad choice for you ! It is up to you how much time and how many money you will put into an evaluation. Evaluate how important this new server is ? I hope, that this might help you. The method, I showed you, can also be used next time you want to buy a car ! >My group may soon need to start running an informix database server. >I am interested in getting peoples opinions on the best platform >(hardware & OS) is best for informix. I think that this would >be a medium size database server with 30-50 concurrent database >users on at the most busy times. A Data General AViiON 4625 may solve this problem. > >The front end will run on a Prolog product called Customerq on >IBM workstations running AIX 3.2.5. Make a practical test to verify, that this will work. > >Our obvious choices are IBM and Sun (we run Sybase on a Sun). >I can consider other platforms also, but I would need to >justify it. Include IBM and Sun in your evaluation. Let them know (All vendors) that they will be compared. You may select IBM at the end of your evaluation. IBM and Sun may also give you an better offer if they know, that they will be compared to other vendors ! > >Also, I would like recommendations on backup schemes. If I will >be purchasing a database server, I wil want to purchase the backup >devices etc. This can be done in a lot of different ways. Daily level 0 backup, where you syncronize your backup of logical logs with your archive. This will give you double security. Also use contiguous transaction backup. (It is not possible to give the correct answer without knowing more.) Regards from ----------------------------------------------------------------- Databaseadministrator Poul Pedersen Kuwait Petroleum (Danmark) A/S Hummeltoftevej 49 Mail: pp@q8.dk 2830 Virum Voice: +45 45 98 45 94 Denmark Fax: +45 42 85 14 18 -----------------------------------------------------------------