Designing RAC Storage For A Small University

Hello, all.

We are a small (1,500 enrollment) university running SCT Banner currently on Oracle 9i on an old HP Alpha. We are looking at upgrading to Oracle 10g on a two-node RAC of Windows or linux machines - windows because our admins here have the most experience administrating it.We would rather build a cluster of boxes rather than just one because we can buy multiple wintel boxes and thus ensure hopefully an even better availability than our old Alpha.

I am discovering that RAC requires external shared storage. Can someone please explain to me what exact kind of hardware (with example make/model if possible) would be needed and can be used in a RAC? Our database is under 10GB in size and we have about 50 users. I am getting lost in the diference between NAS and SAN and which one will work, and I'm seeing dollar figures of $12-15,000, which, as a storage solution for two $3,000 servers, seems a little out of scope, especially since Oracle's big "grid" thing is supposed to be about /in/expensive hardware.

Thanks for the help, Tim Received on Fri Nov 04 2005 - 14:28:07 CST