Re: RAC or Large SMP...?

> 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.

Fair point - I agree 100%

> 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.

Another good advantage of RAC.

> 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.

This is where I fail to see the benefit. That comparison was done against a Sun SMP box which would have been very expensive. Whereas we are considering IBM x3850's which have a list price somewhere around $25,000. Granted we would need at least 2 chassis for the primary and another 2 for the standby/spare but I imagine that the price difference between that and the equivalent RAC setup wouldn't be anywhere near $250,000.

Did your price difference calculation take software/licensing into consideration or only hardware..? Received on Thu Oct 09 2008 - 17:45:52 CDT