Re: Oracle RAC for scalability or High Availability only

On 2006-03-01, DA Morgan <damorgan_at_psoug.org> wrote:
> JEDIDIAH wrote:
>
>>>Forget? Hardly. It is just that in a group named c.d.o.server the
>>>Oracle licenses were obvious. But as long as you think I'm involved
>>>in marketing here I'll not disappoint you ... Oracle RAC licenses
>>>are a small fraction of the cost of failover hardware.
>>
>>
>> Except that any hardware that is going to be comparable
>> in price to a realistic cost of Oracle on 20 cpus is going to
>> have the HA and scaling features already built into it. That
>> kind of hardware is already effectively it's own cluster.
>
> I asked a day or so ago whether you were ignorant or just didn't
> like RAC: You just answered the question.
>
> The entire point of RAC is to NOT to buy hardware with HA features.

        It rather depends on the shops. For some shops, a collection of dells isn't going to cut it. They're needs are too large.

> You have entirely missed the point of RAC. Not just by a few inches
> but by a few tens of kilometers.
>
> RAC is not about dual power supplies and such. It is about low cost
> hardware. If something goes wrong you want the server to fall over.
> The other nodes in the cluster, load balanced, pick up the processing.

        The beauty of NUMA hardware is it ALREADY DOES THAT and is remarkably simpler and better tested than similar RAC configurations. You don't have to futz with stupid shell scripts in CRS_HOME when you want to add 4 more cpus, you just add a system board and dbas don't even have to be aware of it.

> A typical 2 CPU node for a RAC cluster is less than $5000 USD. If you
> are spending more than that you need to go find your Oracle salesperson
> and check into a re-education camp.

        Then add in the cost of special storage hardware and someone to manage it. Then add in the exta overhead of managing N systems rather than one (more bodies). Add in the extra cost of dbas and sysadmins that are capable of dealing with the new complexities of the various clusterware.

-- 
...as if the ability to run Cubase ever made or broke a platform.
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