RE: DB Appliance

Niall thank you for the great in site.  

JR  

From: Niall Litchfield [mailto:niall.litchfield_at_gmail.com] Sent: February 28, 2012 4:07 PM
To: mayurpnagarsheth_at_gmail.com
Cc: jreid_at_braintreegroup.com; oracle-l_at_freelists.org Subject: Re: DB Appliance  

OK I'll bite.  

It looked to me as though Joe had read the data sheet ( http://www.oracle.com/us/products/database/oracle-database-appliance-ds-4954 10.pdf ) and was after some real world experience, and in particular any downsides. I'm guessing that a repeat of the sales pitch isn't what he was looking for. Still I'll embed a few comments inline  

On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 7:10 PM, mayur nagarsheth <mayurpnagarsheth_at_gmail.com> wrote:

Hello,
I am working with Oracle as a Solution Architect. Oracle database appliance has been one of the hot products for diverse groups of enterprise.

ODA is a simple, quick, complete, affordable, HA cluster database system in a single box.  

Interesting that you describe it as HA in a single box. How does it cope with data centre or database failures? I suspect you'll find that it doesn't. You'll need a proper HA solution for that. That means that Joe will at least be looking for an additional HA solution I suspect.  

I myself had an opportunity to install and play with it. We were able to install ODA RAC environment in just 53 minutes.  

What does install time mean? I suspect you mean completion of the OAKCLI setup rather than, for example migration of any real existing data from an actual application.  

It's a simple
and complete system where software and hardware is engineered together. It comes with two nodes. You can use it as Stand alone, RAC one node or RAC. Red Hat linux 5 comes pre-installed. It is highly redundant. All the data are triple mirrored.  

What types of failure does ASM High redundancy (which is what triple mirrored means here) protect you from? I think you'll find the answers are hardware rather than software or application related.  

Also, from licensing point of view, you pay as you grow. You can start with licensing 2 cores and then as you need you can license more. Miximum is 24 cores.  

This is probably my biggest beef with the whole setup. If you build an equivalent system yourself (and I'll take Oracle's word for it that their hardware pricing is pretty good) then the cost of licensing SE which allows you RAC and the full power of the box is in English money a shade over £50k. The price of licensing the required software for a 2 core per node ODA is by my reckoning 2CPU licenses of EE and RAC which comes in at, er just under £100k. To use all the cores *like you would in the roll your own system* would cost the best part of £400k. The triple redundancy means that you are limiting the database and recovery area (assuming they are on the same appliance) to 4tb which is pushing, but not unreasonable for, SE.    

Shared disk:

12 TB raw storage

292 GB SSD flash disks for redo logs. Top 4 disk slots.

Remaining disks slots SAS drives of 600GB each.    

Do you have I/O capacity figures for this thing? Sustained IOPS? Throughput? I suspect the cpus are more powerful than the ASM subsystem here (at least when not artificially throttled which purportedly happens before the latest patch).  

In an effort not just to be negative, I think this is a great small warehouse appliance, did some looking as well for ODA in the bug database. Not many as yet, but there is a patch set 12978712 is the patch#, in addition Note Oracle Database Appliance Current Product Issues [ID 1360736.1] looks useful. It would also appear that ODA will only support 11.2.0.2 and above and support for multiple homes is patchy.                                       

-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.orawin.info


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