RAC High End Scalability?

ORACLE make lots of claims about the scalability of RAC that I would like to believe.

Microsoft recently (late last year) published a paper disputing some of these claims.

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/evaluation/compare/RealityBehind_RAC.pdf

Now, I'm well aware that a Microsoft paper is going to be biased, but they do make a good point that nobody have published any RAC benchmarks showing RAC scalability using a cluster of high end servers. I'm interested in knowing if RAC can be made to scale using small clusters (4 or 8) of IBM p690's, HP Superdomes or high end Sun gear, where each server has 16 or more CPUs in it?

If a single 64-CPU HP Superdome can manage a tpmC result of 423,414
(http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_perf_results.asp?resulttype=noncluster)

what could a cluster of 4 or 8 of them manage with RAC?

Does anybody have practical experience of using RAC for scalability
(not just failover) in high end UNIX servers such as these?

Regards,
Michael. Received on Tue Feb 18 2003 - 06:40:37 CST