Re: RAC or Large SMP...?

On Oct 6, 5:40 pm, mc..._at_hotmail.com wrote:
> I support an OLTP application which handles 2 million transactions per
> day and is running on 10gR2 EE on RHEL 4 x86_64.
>
> I am investigating scaling options for the application and I'm trying
> to decide between 2 large SMP servers or a multi-node RAC
> configuration.
>
> As far as I can tell, the highest number of cores available in an
> x64_64 server is 24.  This would only allow us to handle 6 times the
> current workload, and realistically we need to be able to support up
> to 20 times the load.
>
> Has anyone had any experience of comparing the 2 approaches with
> respect to cost, manageability, performance, etc.  Can you offer any
> advise and/or pointers to resources to help out with this
> investigation.
>
> Specifically I'm interested in:
>
> What is the most powerful x86_64 machine available..?
> Can Oracle scale well on NUMA based architectures (as some of the high
> end x64_64 based servers seem to be)..?
> Is the cost difference between '2 x large SMP' and 'multi-node RAC'
> large enough to justify the extra complexity of administering a
> cluster environment...?
>
> Any assistance on this would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks

For NUMA, you might google around, I don't know much about it, but there seem to be some issues, see
http://kevinclosson.wordpress.com/kevin-closson-index/oracle-on-opteron-k8l-numa-etc/ for example.

Also check the licensing core documents carefully, and note that they sometimes change unexpectedly.

I personally fall into the probably-don't-need-rac camp, but since you are already on RHEL, Tim and Dan probably-give-better-advice-for-you.

(Here's another "thanks for the detailed post," Tim).

jg

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