PostgreSQL 9 High Availability Cookbook

Selecting a chassis

To round out our hardware selection phase, it's time to decide just what kind of case to order from our server vendor. This is the final protective element that hosts the motherboard, drives, and power supplies necessary to keep everything running. And like always, we place heavy emphasis on redundancy.

For the purposes of this section, we will concentrate primarily on 1U and 2U rack-mounted servers. Why not 4U or larger? Our goal is to obtain at least two of everything, with similar or matching specifications in every possible scenario. The idea is to scale horizontally, in order to more easily replace a failed component or server. As the size of the chassis increases, its cost, complexity, and resource consumption also rise. ...