Re: RAC or Large SMP...?

Hello *,

just my 2 cents to the discussion.

I would recommend large SMP machine instead of many small machines with RAC. The most important point is the simplicity and affordability of current SMP offerings. In my opinion it is easier (mainly from the administration point of view as a DBA) to buy one large machine and do not worry at all about all the complexity that comes with RAC.

I remember times when we were evaluating the RAC offering. The biggest machine we could afford was Sun Enterprise 450 with 4 x 450Mhz CPU and 4G of RAM. We could not afford the expensive 15K and we were hitting the memory limit. Simply we would like to have more RAM and RAC was the possible answer - running many instances against one database, where each instance capable of using 4G of RAM. At that time thinking about RAC was reasonable. I honestly do not believe it is true any longer.

For the price of 4G of RAM and 4 CPU back then (almost 10 years ago) one can buy modern Sun T2 machine with 64G of RAM and 64 CPUs. With such a huge RAM and CPU available to the medium size enterprise I trully question the point in making all the efford to go with RAC.

What is the point of RAC anyway - use more CPU or RAM by buying another machine if you can not expand the current one. I personaly do not consider RAC as HA solution. Yes it saves you in case of server failure but not in case with storage failure. Why bother to have a partial HA if with little more efford (another storage) you can build real HA solution using standby database. Then you do not care if the server or starage fails - you simply switch to the standby site.

Greetings
Remigiusz Boguszewicz Received on Thu Oct 09 2008 - 14:24:24 CDT