Re: RAC Clusterware Question

From: DA Morgan <damorgan_at_psoug.org>
Date: Tue, 25 Jul 2006 03:38:14 -0700
Message-ID: <1153780720.585620@bubbleator.drizzle.com>

boogab00_at_yahoo.com wrote:

> hpuxrac wrote:

>> boogab00_at_yahoo.com wrote:

>>> hpuxrac wrote:
>>>> DA Morgan wrote:
>>>>> Greg wrote:
>>>>>> Currently I'm using Oracle RAC with OCFS for Oracle on Linux.  It is
>>>>>> pretty much a broken and BAD product. Is anyone using the Veritas
>>>>>> Clustering and Veritas file system for Linux?
>>>>>> Experience?
>>>>>> Pros/Cons?
>>>>>> Share any info?
>>>>>>
>>>>>> -Greg
>>>>> What version of Oracle?
>>>>>
>>>>>  From my experience OCFS is a stop-gap solution for a problem that
>>>>> no longer exists. Veritas? I wouldn't spend $5 on it if I could use
>>>>> a 100% Oracle solution and you can with 10g.
>>>> Is that like your advice for implementing production systems on mac os
>>>> x ... subject to later revision?
>>> Who the heck would recommend that and why in the first place?

>> At one point there was a lot of self promotion in this newsgroup about
>> rac clusters on mac os. ( Well self promotion is being polite ). Try
>> searching the google newsgroup with things like "mac cluster" or "kent
>> stroker" and you will find the postings.

>>

>> Certain of the people posting here were giving advice here and telling
>> people to run production systems and rac clusters on mac os. How you
>> get patches and patchsets when you run into issues ... that's a good
>> question eh?

>>

>> That answers the who part anyway.

>>

>> The "why" is a better question.

>>

>> It is fine to get excited from time to time about oracle announcing new
>> platforms. Over the years many of us have seen a history of "one time"
>> or "two time" releases of oracle on certain platforms that are
>> subsequently "no longer supported".

> 
> Hmmm, interesting.  It must've been from someone who's never been a
> production DBA and have to support something like that.

Not at all. Apple is one of Oracle's largest customers and a strategic alliance was created between the companies. One of the world's foremost RAC experts, and an associate of mine, built the very first RAC cluster on Apple's hardware and we were invited by both companies to be partners too.

Benchmarking clearly demonstrated that RAC clusters built using the Mac OSX operating system blew away, by both cost and performance, those from Dell, HP, IBM, and Sun.

At Oracle OpenWorld last year Oracle gave me one of only two booths in the Conference facility at Moscone and an associate of mine built a 24 node cluster. There were also two 10 node clusters built for a major commercial bank in Japan to run SAP and there are quite a few working clusters here in the US and also in Western Europe (mostly Germany).

Were it not for the success of the iPod and Nano it is likely that Apple would not have changed its mind about a major move into the corporate data center and would today be a major player.

Also before you join a certain other person in trashing Apple in the data center you might want to look at the size of their non-Oracle footprint in the corporate world. We tend to think of TB databases as large. Apple customers, editing video, move around that much data regularly and with ease. Thus the bus structure and the high-end IBM CPUs were all designed to provide far higher performance at a far lower cost.

It isn't a platform I'd choose today. But not due to any failing of the hardware or O/S. Just the fact that they didn't continue their support to 10.1.0.4 and beyond.

-- 
Daniel A. Morgan
University of Washington
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)
Puget Sound Oracle Users Group
www.psoug.org

Received on Tue Jul 25 2006 - 05:38:14 CDT