Re: Oracle RAC for scalability or High Availability only

On 2006-02-15, DA Morgan <damorgan_at_psoug.org> wrote:
> Joel Garry wrote:
>>>Add 2 850 MHz procs and 2GB RAM to an SMP box: quoted at $150K
>>
>>
>> I've seen hp boxes much cheaper than that
>
> I'm working off a PowerPoint slide presentation internally developed at
> HP, branded by HP with, their copyright and logo. It may not be their
> current pricing. But it definitely was not that long ago.
>
> What is the best price you can get for a 10 CPU box and then adding 2 more?
>
> I can do it with RAC beginning at $15,000 and the additional 2 CPUs will
> cost another $3K for a total of $18K.
>
> The Oracle EE license cost is per CPU so it isn't part of the equation.
>
> The RAC license cost is 1/2 of the EE licenses and is.

        OTOH, adding nodes to the cluster is not just about the cost of the boxes or of Oracle. Each box is going to your network and storage systems overhead. That next box might require you to get another high speed network switch (or 2 if you are being extra robust). The same goes with your fiber switches. Then there's the question of whether or not your storage array can handle that level of concurrency (nfs, iscsi or san).

        It's not just 5x cheap liliputians against the big expensive Gulliver.

        Then you've got the fun of your cluster fs and clusterware interacting over those 5x boxes.

        RAC requires more interesting and more expensive storage hardware then itself becomes an expensive single point of failure.

>
> But more importantly. You only have one box and zero failover. So double
> the cost on your side, make that 2x10CPU boxes and be sure you have the
> EE licenses for them. Then add DataGuard for failover.
>
> RAC is very reasonably priced when you consider everything required.

        It's an extra 20K per cpu. That buys an awful lot of hardware and non-RAC oracle licenses.

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