Re: RAC storage options

On Tue, 13 Apr 2004, Mogens Nørgaard wrote:

>
> Dan,
>

<snip/>

> My question is this: Are you looking for financially lucrative options?
> If yes, how does RAC fit into that? Would it be cheaper to avoid RAC?

The $25k question indeed. One of the main reasons I find RAC compelling is that the overall architecture of how it works is similar to how we handle our web page serving. We get a bunch of commodity boxes, using shared storage, and load-balance them. It doesn't matter if one of the individual boxes dies, since we have N more to cover for it while it's down.

I'm aware of alternative Oracle HA solutions such as Data Guard, but it's nice (as the Oracle sales reps are quick to point out) to use 100% of my investment up front instead of only 50%.

At first glance, it's financially appealing, since it's Linux, which is 'cheap' and it's commodity Intel hardware, which is also 'cheap', and it looks like it would scale well as we grow. The one piece in all this that gets the hand-waving is the storage layer. That's the main question I'm trying to answer now, how much am I going to have to fork out for the storage for this system? Will the underlying storage system be as easy to scale as the nodes in the cluster? (Not nearly as easy, is my guess).

>
> When that question is answered, I think it's cool to talk about storage.
> There are fun things out there, like ASM from Oracle (which ONLY handles
> Oracle data files), or indeed Polyserve, which seems to handle everything.
>
> I've CC'ed Sir James Morle on this. He knows stuff, and often proves me
> wrong.
>
> Mogens

Thanks for your thoughts,

• Dan

>
> Daniel Hanks wrote:
>
> > We're looking to upgrade our current database architecture, to something that will handle potentially 3-4 times our current load/size, etc. We're looking at RAC as an option, but I'm wondering what storage options are available for RAC. At a Technology Day about a year or so back, they showed a small RAC cluster using a NetApp for the shared storage component. What other storage options are available? EMC is the obvious other, but what else is available/supported? Anything that serves lots of disk via NFS?
> >
> > Currently we are managing around 50G of data+indexes, so it's not a whole lot we need in terms of space. Moving up to 4x that would only be 200G, still not very large. Are there options cheaper than NetApp that would be feasible?
> >
> > Thanks for your input,
> >
> > -- Dan Hanks
> > ========================================================================
> > Daniel Hanks - Systems/Database Administrator
> > United Online, Mega Web Services
> > ========================================================================
> >
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-- 
========================================================================
   Daniel Hanks - Systems/Database Administrator
   United Online, Mega Web Services
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