Re: RAC or Large SMP...?

<mccmx_at_hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:30456044-e3c2-457e-8165-2cabeedafe95_at_w13g2000prm.googlegroups.com...
>> If you have your mind set on x86, I would suggest looking into IBM
>> xSeries.
>> They can scale way beyond 24 cores.- Hide quoted text -
>
> Yeah x86_64 is the chosen platform.
>
> I thought 24 cores was the limit for xSeries. How far can you go..?
>

You can go further by combining multiple SMP boxes, 64 cores with the latest Intel.

> I heard that the architecture of the high and IBM xSeries is NUMA
> based (rather than SMP) and I was concerned at whether an Oracle
> database with a large SGA would be able to scale on a NUMA based box
> considering the relatively high latencies of non-local memory access.
>

I think IBM would prefer not calling it NUMA because it implies slow memory access. The inter-module transfer rate is actually very fast, much faster than typical RAC interconnect. Unless your applications are well designed for RAC, I would recommend 2 large RAC nodes instead of many small ones.

> Do you have any experience with Oracle on high end xSeries..?
>

No, my high end systems are all non-x86. I am seriously looking into this option though. Received on Wed Oct 08 2008 - 19:35:00 CDT