Re: Oracle RAC for scalability or High Availability only

dananrg_at_yahoo.com wrote:
> Oracle's marketing literature pitches RAC clusters as a way to scale.
> Someone I know who uses RAC claims it is a product for High
> Availability only, and never for scalability; that the scalability
> thing is mostly marketing bluster from Oracle. My acquaintance
> recommended that we size our server properly for the application at
> hand rather than use RAC unless High Availability was a requirement (it
> isn't).
>
> For people here who use RAC, do you find RAC is valuable for
> scalability or that, like my acquaintance said, it is chiefly an HA
> product?

Your acquaintance needs to become better acquainted with RAC.

Scaling is one of the most critical strengths of a RAC cluster and it has absolutely nothing to do with marketing.

Very simply here are the numbers from Hewlett Packard (Not Oracle). Add 2 850 MHz procs and 2GB RAM to an SMP box: quoted at $150K Add dual 3.0 GHz server w/4GB RAM to a RAC cluster: quoted at $24K

Scaling reported by HP at 82%

RAC has three major strengths:

1. High-availability
2. Scalability
3. Lower system cost ...
4. Performance. -- Daniel A. Morgan http://www.psoug.org damorgan_at_x.washington.edu (replace x with u to respond)