Intel ISP4400

I’ve wanted to carry on investigating parallel execution for a while but, unless you happen to be working on a reasonably large data warehouse with a few spare test environments kicking around, it’s difficult. Without wishing to reopen the whole debate about the value of single user test scripts (which work brilliantly for most things, including the single user test script that Tom Kyte ran on his laptop to prove the worst error in my px paper), working out the best degree of parallelism or an appropriate setting for parallel_max_servers is a little difficult on a Celeron M laptop. So I’ve been looking round for some kit to work on at home. If you’re ever in the same situation, here’s a few things you could try

1) Ask your boss if there’s a spare server you can do the work on. Not so good if you’re a contractor/consultant and a little inconvenient for those late night sessions.

2) Drop heavy hints to any ex-colleagues who work for hardware vendors. It didn’t work, but thanks to Andy Campbell at Sun for giving it his best shot 😉

3) Rent a server for the duration of your tests from a company like Hamilton Rentals in the UK. This is a solution I’ve used in the past if we wanted to do recovery tests, for example. If your managers won’t run to a full copy of your production server, then at least rent one so you can test your recovery procedure. (Testing recovery of production against production is an interesting concept …) The prices are pretty steep for an individual though, particularly when there’s no obvious pay-off to justify it.

4) That old standby, eBay. In the end, this is what I went for but I was determined that I didn’t want to spend too much on this because I don’t need the latest and greatest hardware. I did think about a dual-CPU (dual-core) Opteron or Athlon 64X2, but they’re pretty steep for ‘play’ hardware. The most important things I was looking for was a minimum of 4 CPUs, decent i/o infrastructure so I could stripe and at least 1Gb RAM. Here’s what I got :-

http://tinyurl.com/bfem3

Intel ISP4400
4 x 700MHz Xeon
5 Drive bays, populated with 2 x 36Gb 10K RPM Ultra SCSI 160
3.5Gb RAM

All for �160 (roughly $280), which seems a bargain to me. Of course, I’ll need to spend at least another �40 ($70) to get it moved to Edinburgh and who knows if it’ll survive the trip, but I think it’s a chance worth taking. I suppose that’s the benefit of a fast-moving industry – what was great hardware a few years ago is now unwanted and therefore cheap. (If you look at the waste, though ….)

I’m going to try to source another 3 matching hard disk drives and stick Linux and various versions of Oracle on it.

I’m still at the early stages of delicate negotiations that will determine where this pretty piece of equipment will live in the house, but I think I may be spending more time than usual in the downstairs bedroom over the next couple of months 😉

I’ll keep you posted.

Added later (I forgot to mention). Of course, if you have �2900 ($5100) to spare and the power in place, you could go for this … (although I have to say this didn’t go down too well at home)

http://tinyurl.com/9jza9