Re: RAC on Mac News

From: DA Morgan <damorgan_at_psoug.org>
Date: Sat, 21 May 2005 10:04:23 -0700
Message-ID: <1116694802.968042@yasure>

Billy wrote:
> These were mounted in existing RAC cabinets. So no railings needed.

The point I was trying to make is that for price comparison you need to compare equal configurations. Rail kits cost about $250/1U server and with G5s they are built-in ... no need to pay extra for them.

> There were no hidden extras either. We got RHES WS for the majority and
> RHES AS for about a dozen. I think that the total cost per V20z was
> far under $10,000 (including RH and additional Infiniband h/w and SAN
> connectivity h/w per node).

I'm not sure how to interpret "far under" but a dual proc G5 cluster node has a list price of $4.8K and I am aware of them being discounted to $3.6K. So even with an extremely liberal interpretation of "far under" I'll bet you are more than double the actual cost of hardware that is both more secure and has far better performance.

>>is Oracle providing a Mac version of the RDBMS. Oracle support will
>>absolutely stand behind this hardware-o/s combination and I have
>>guarantees that they will support up to, IIRC, an 80 node cluster.
>>Remember clustering is an Oracle product and has nothing to do with
>>the understanding hardware. RAC runs, ASM runs, DataGuard runs, etc.

>
>
> Accept that. But Apple Mac servers of the past ran OS/9. OS/X (although
> build on a mature o/s) is a new comer on the Mac hardware. There were
> more than a fair share of teething problems with it. The G5 CPU does
> not compare ito price & performance with AMD or Intel (as benchmarks
> have shown). The AMD 64bit CPUs are impressive to say the least.

Surely you drinking more scotch than I am. The AMD and Intel benchmarks are so far from the IBM P5 that they need a telescope to see that far. Did you miss the fact that the G5's are using top line IBM P5 CPUs? BTW: We are seeing 100-120MB/sec throughput on these and this isn't maxing out anything. Even if the AMD and Intel CPUs were the equal of the P5 the fact that they are sharing an 800MHz bus whereas the G5 has dual independent 1.25GHz buses would be enough to make the difference.

>>OCFS has not been ported but storage can be RAW or ASM or NFS to a
>>NetApp and no doubt NFS to an EMC but I have yet to personally verify
>>this.

>
> Have heard that OCFS 2 will be available for Solaris.. Would like to
> see it myself on HP-UX though.

Why would anyone want to use OCFS? Yes it is there ... but so is ASM. OCFS doesn't load balance ... ASM does.

>>If you look at the demo hardware I used at Battelle PNL you will
>>see the two G5s are simultaneously connected to both the Apple Xserve
>>RAID and also to a NetApp FAS270. Storage is definitely not an issue.

>
> Sounds good. But hey, no urges this side to swap my Sunfire V20z
> cluster for a G5 cluster. :-)
>
>
> --
> Billy

I understand. But I'll bet if I put the numbers in front of your CFO he'd have a very different opinion. ;-)

-- 
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)

Received on Sat May 21 2005 - 12:04:23 CDT