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Re: Oracle RAC for scalability or High Availability only

From: <dananrg_at_yahoo.com>
Date: 15 Feb 2006 06:54:16 -0800
Message-ID: <1140015256.204141.59590@g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>


I read Mogen's white paper. Thanks for the suggestion.

Is RAC scalability typically only justifiable when you need to purchase a server that has more than 4 CPUs? Someone mentioned a 10 CPU box. I don't have that magnitude of growth to worry about, and I don't need to have HA.

In my case, I am looking at two scenarios:

  1. A small RAC configuration, we'd have two-nodes, each of which would be a dual-CPU machine.
  2. In the second scenario, we'd have a single quad-CPU-capable SMP server (that we cannot grow beyond 4 CPUs), purchasing it with only 2 processors at first, then scaling vertically by adding another 2 processors when needed, plus additional memory. Although testing may show we'll need all 4 CPUs out of the gate.

At what rate of growth would RAC make sense financially from a scalability-only perspective? Let's suppose that in 3-5 years the system is tapped out and our user base and/or system resource requirements doubles. In that time, if Moore's Law is still holding-up, wouldn't it be cheaper overall to replace the single SMP server with the latest and greatest hardware rather than use RAC? Yeah, I know it's a pain to migrate to another server vs. simply adding another node. But at what level of forecasted scalability does RAC become a must (or highly recommended) vs. a single SMP server? 50% growth? 100%? 200%? 400%?

I'd like to hear more arguments in favor of a single SMP server, just to know RAC's proper place based on expected growth of users and/or system resources. Thanks muchly. Received on Wed Feb 15 2006 - 08:54:16 CST

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