Re: RAC or Large SMP...?

DA Morgan <damorgan_at_psoug.org> writes:

>
> 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."

Our analysis of costs and ROI came out about the same, plus we found that if we hit the max load, adding another large SMP box was going to be a lot more cost and would likely add a lot more power than needed than adding another node to the RAC. As we have seen fairly steady increase in processing power requirements rather than large jumps, RAC seemed a better choice and we get the additional risk mitigation.

I'm also not convinced that the fewer servers are easier to administer arguement is as valid these days. This was certainly true in the past, but modern package management has become quite sophisticated. Managing larger numbers of servers dedicated to the same role isn't that much of an overhead anymore. At least we haven't seen a substantial increase in administration since moving to RAC. In fact, the added fault tolerance has reduced impact and stress on staff when hardware failures occur.

Tim

-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au