Oracle RAC cost justification?

Hi,

I just wanted to get people's opinions on the cost justification for RAC. The following are list prices.

$40K per processor for Oracle EE license + $20K per processor for RAC.

If I want to have a total capacity of 8 CPUs that's $160K of RAC licenses. How are people justifying RAC in such a scenario -- is it less expensive to buy 2 4 way SMP boxes rather than 1 8 way SMP box? Anyone have rough price figures they can share for Unix boxes (just for comparison)?=20

Thanks.

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