Skip clustering. That's one of the last items you tackle. I suggest
you pick up a copy of Blueprints for High Availabilty, 2nd edition by
Marcus and Stern, ISBN 0471430269.

You should probably approach your system in this order (suprisingly, the
chapter order in the book!):

Backups
Disk systems
SANs or NAS
Network
Data Center
Process and Vendors
Clients
Application design
Services
Clustering
Failover
Replication

Culminating in a company wide disaster recovery plan.

-----Original Message-----
From: firebird-support@yahoogroups.com
[mailto:firebird-support@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Ivan Cruz
Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2006 11:55 AM
To: firebird-support@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [firebird-support] Need advise on Server Configuration

Sudheer Palaparambil wrote:

> Hello, Approximately 50,000 records will be added to H O DB daily

It's a fair number, but nothing to worry about. Let's say every record
takes 500 bytes (I'm exagerating, I know). It gives 25 MB a day or
6.3 GB a year (250 working days). It will take 10 years to fill a 80 GB
disk.

> and there will be 25 concurrent users approximately

>From my previous experience, anything below 50 connections is an easy

task.

> Please advise on the configuration of a Server Machine, Firdbird DB
> Page size etc.

There is nothing to worry about your database size, batch inserts or
connection count. Any current CPU must suffice. The problem will be on
the actual queries you will implement in the future. A badly crafted
query can bring a powerful machine to it's knees.

Start by making sure your relations are well designed and normalized,
create *all* referential constraints that apply, create indexes on your
date fields and try to restrict queries to a few months of data.

For the hardware I would advice to pay attention to disks. On the cheap
side you can go with 2 x 150 GB SATA and RAID 1 (for redundancy). If you
have $2K spare, go for 4 x 96 GB SCSI 15K RPM with RAID 5.

> We are planning to use Linux OS, also recommend a suitable Linux

Distro.

I have used SuSE (7.0 and 7.2) and Conectiva (9 and 10) in the past.
Currently I use Ubuntu. I don't know about current versions of SuSE or
Conectiva (now Mandriva), but Ubuntu was the only one that offered some
Firebird support. Despite they ship a rather old version (1.5.1) PHP 4
on Ubuntu 5.10 works with Firebird out of the box, no need to recompile.

> We will also look at the possibilities of a clustered system.

As far as I know, Firbird doesn't support clustering. Are you talking
about something like http://c-jdbc.objectweb.org/?

> Thank you. Sudheer Palaparambil

Ivan.



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