As of 12-Jan-2006 we have the V890 installed in the racks.
We expect to have it powered up sometime today. We've been waiting on the power install.
The V890 requires three 220V circuits and weighs 250pounds.
It will take some weeks of configuration and testing, and then it will become the main PBase database server.
The StorEdge 3310 units are shelves of disks which will be attached to the V890 for all the database files. No photos live on these disks, only the data about the photos, galleries, accounts, comments, etc.

One of the biggest improvements will be more memory. This machine will have 32GB RAM, compared to 16GB in current database machine. But more importantly we'll be able to allocate nearly 20GB of that to the database buffer cache compared with about 3GB in the current machine.
This means that most of the often used data will be cached in RAM and not have to come from the disks so performance should be incredibly better.
CPU power is not really a bottleneck in the current machine, but the new machine will essentially have twice the number of CPUs as well as far greater on chip cache.

We're also upgrading the version of Oracle, the database software, from the standard edition to the enterprise edition. This upgrade will increase performance, decrease maintenance time, and provide a simpler and more reliable backup plan.

This upgrade has been a long time coming, mainly for financial reasons, but the improvements to performance, reliability, and vendor hardware and software support plans will make the backbone of the equipment architecture extremely solid.