RE: 64 node Oracle RAC Cluster (The reality of...)

I haven't worked with ASM so I cannot comment on whether to use it or not however a couple reasons to use it could be cost and support. AFAIK there is no extra charge for ASM and Veritas is very expensive for any/all of their products. As for support it is better to talk one set of support staff instead of 2 pointing fingers at each other without having to pay extra for VOS support.

As we all know Oracle incorporates many new products/features with each new release, many of which do not pan out. Some of these products however make our lives much easier and within a few years become very robust and we wonder how we lived without them in the past. Time will tell which category ASM will fall into. At least Oracle doesn't force you to use these new features for many many years after they come out.

For example RMAN is now a very mature product that I whole heartedly support although when it first came out about 7 years ago I didn't see a need for it and thought the existing method of doing backups at the time were far superior. Today, after seven years we can still use hot and cold backup scripts if we choose too, even with their shortcomings.

I personally like the fact that Oracle is innovative and they keep adding useful features regardless if they develop it in-house or via acquisition. If they didn't keep improving their core product(s) they themselves would be acquired; possibly by a company in Redmond WA and then where would we be? I would cherish the day when any company programmed out all the routine tasks of database management. I know we are still far from it (one can dream), but I believe progress is being made.

Ken Naim
Oracle DBA & Developer

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Mladen Gogala
Sent: Wednesday, June 22, 2005 7:14 PM
To: kevinc_at_polyserve.com
Cc: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Re: 64 node Oracle RAC Cluster (The reality of...)

On 06/22/2005 04:34:04 PM, Kevin Closson wrote:
> >
> >1) Just because a CFS is supported doesn't mean it is the most
> >reliable service of an OS. If a given vintage of ASM or straight
> >shared raw has fewer "moving parts" (shall we say less code path?)
> >than a given CFS,
>
> can you tell me how having a separate instance specifically for ASM
> in addition to your production instances is considered less moving
> parts? As far as code path, raw versus direct IO CFS comparisons are
> old school. ASM has, um, quite a bit of overhead and comms when
> manipulating files (not to be confused with manipulating the contents
> of files).

ASM was advertised as "Veritas killer" (wink, wink) and is, according to what I read, a database-aware version of LVM. I am slowly getting used to idea of Oracle devouring its customers (PeopleSoft, BEA Systems, Veritas) but I still don't see why I wouldn't go with EMC and clustered FS (Polyserve Matrix, VxFS, OCFS) instead of Oracle. Why would I want to add another layer of complexity to the database software and not go with proven volume managers (I believe that both Veritas and EMC have something like that) which do not drop a file here and there? My problem with Veritas killer is why would they want to kill Veritas in the first place? Just because Geoff Squire used to be Ellison's no. 2? I believe that Veritas have brought many customers to Oracle and that they have an excellent range of products (file system, backup, replication) which doesn't compete with Oracle. What is next? Oracle to buy Red Hat? IBM? HP? SUN? The company in Redmond WA? No, they cannot conquer Redmond, but everything else is in the realm of possibility.

--
Mladen Gogala
Oracle DBA


--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l