Running large DB's on FreeBSD

[Mike Jakubik]

Greetings,

    I am in the process of implementing a fairly large mysql server for 
an even larger company, and naturally i want to use FreeBSD. The 
hardware will be an HP DL385, 2 x dual-core Opterons, 16GB RAM,  7 x 15k 
rpm disks in a RAID5 setup. I'm not exactly informed as to the specific 
workload yet, however i know the database will have several million rows 
and be larger than 10GB.

    So, first of all, am i crazy for choosing fbsd+mysql for this rather 
than something like Solaris + Oracle? :) Secondly, i am just looking for 
some suggestions, opinions, success/failure story's that may help me 
out. Is anyone out there using FreeBSD for something of this size? I am 
hoping that everything will work out well, and the client will be happy. 
This would generate some good PR for FreeBSD, as it is a very large 
international company and it would be the first FreeBSD server (that i 
know of) of this type there.

Thanks, any input will be appreciated.