Re: RAC or Large SMP...?

Remigiusz.Boguszewicz_at_gmail.com wrote:
> 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.

Lets consider what you suggest in a bit more detail.

A large SMP machine will fail over to what? Another large SMP machine of course. So you've bought two of them and one is idle, sucking up overhead and electricity and doing essentially nothing. And, of course, you had to buy a machine sized to handle your largest workload which means it has a huge number of wasted cycles most of the time.

Now with RAC we have the initial overhead of training a couple of DBAs. That should set you back less than $10,000 USD. Then you buy inexpensive commodity servers, just enough to handle your needs at the primary site, fewer for the secondary site, and within an hour or two, at most, you can move nodes from one place to another as needed so it doesn't matter.

At Oracle OpenWorld in 2005 I built a 24 node cluster on the third level of Moscone West. We had someone from Sun price it out using SMP and RAC. The difference in price, for just one comparable SMP machine as compared to our one RAC cluster was in excess of $250,000 USD. That pays for a lot of training.

There is a word that describes companies with a single large SMP box at a single location. That word is "vulnerable."

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