RE: [new info] Redhat Advanced Server Dev Edition - RAC

I heard Mogens talk about this at the UKOUG Unix SIG in London at the end of last month ("You Probably Don't Need RAC, or: pRos And Cons"). It was truly an eye opener! The upshot was, if you don't have a requirement to be up from a failure within 5 minutes, then you don't need RAC. As has already been pointed out, in the case of a SAN failure, then even this may not count.

Mogens also mentioned some pretty interesting up time statistics. A single Unix box can have an availability of 99.9%. A two node Unix cluster has an availability of 98% (due to software patching/upgrades). There is also still a "brown out" period with RAC when a node fails, whilst the other node or nodes play "catch up" to re-assign the resources and recover any work that the failed node was doing at the point of failure.

Of course, there are also pros to having RAC, workload partitioning (running batch on one node, OLTP type work on another), you can scale your CPUs as and when the increase is needed.

There seemed to be far more cons than pros imo though. Mogens goes through a lot more in his talk, it is certainly worth your time! It certainly helps to widen your perspective from the constant marketing jargon ;)

I really must remember to send Mogens an email, he loves email, send it to him directly, I'm sure he'll be ecstatic! :D

Mark

-----Original Message-----
Sent: 11 February 2003 23:34
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

FYI, I am headed to Mogens RAC or Not to RAC presentation at the hotsos symposium, let you know what I learn!

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, February 11, 2003 10:30 AM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

This is all cool technology, and fun stuff to play with.

It all begs the questions,

"How many of us work for a business that actually need this?"

"Are they willing to pay $400/user $20k/CPU above the cost of Oracle 9i EE to use it?"

"Are they willing to pay the extra overhead required to maintain it?"

I'm not sure the ROI is there for many of us. Though downtime at our business is somewhat expensive, I think that a failover system or even standby database will provide adequate coverage for us, which is indeed a hot topic here right now, after our Dell SAN put us out of business for 36 hours.

RAC wouldn't have helped much there. Niether would a cluster for that matter. Standby DB would have been perfect.

This whole push of RAC by Oracle reminds me very much of the mlife phone campaign by ATT. Do you really need to take pictures with your phone? And what is the point of sending text messages to someone elses phone when you could just call them?

ATT needs you to buy this stuff, because they have it for sale.

I see RAC in a similar light. Do you need RAC? Oracle needs you to 'need' it, because they need some reason for you to spend more money on their product.

Jared

On Saturday 08 February 2003 21:23, Richard Ji wrote:
> To those who are interested in running RAC on Linux.
> I know we have been talking about RAC on linux lately. This is great news
> Redhat has made a special developer's edition for their Advanced Server
> which
> only costs $60! So we don't have to shell out $699 for a copy of RHAS 2.1
> to play with RAC.
>
> http://www.redhat.com/software/advancedserver/developer/
>
> Have fun.
>
> Richard Ji

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