Re: Larry Ellison comments on Microsoft's benchmark

From: Ivana Humpalot <ivana_humpalot_at_nospam.com>
Date: 2000/07/06
Message-ID: <Fu395.30533$i5.329812@news1.frmt1.sfba.home.com>#1/1

"Neil Pike" <100577.553_at_compuserve.com> wrote:

> How can a single disk-subsystem be 12 times more reliable than
> 12 disk subsystems? A logical or physical corruption here is
> going to affect all OPS nodes.

Yes, a corrupted disk will take affect all OPS nodes. However this is better than having 12 disks, and having your system go down if any *one* of those 12 disks is corrupted.

If you have 12 disks as opposed to 1 then the probability of at least one disk going down is 12 times higer. So your system is 12 times less reliable.

If you set the disk aside for a moment and look only at the reliability of the machines (and OS, especially in Windows land), then Oracle Parallel Server with the same 12 machines is INFINITELY more reliable than a DB/2 or MS SQL on 12 machines. Why? Because in Oracle Parallel Server, if one machine goes down the system as a whole is unaffected (except for lower performance.) Thus unless all the machines go down at the same time (very unlikely) your system is up. In DB/2 or MS SQL, if AT LEAST one machine goes down the system as a whole is down. If you have 12 machines then the probability of at least one machine going down is 12 times higher, so your system as a whole is 12 times less reliable compared to a system with only one machine. And if you compare to Oracle Parallel Server running on the same 12 machines, DB/2 and MS SQL are INFINITELY less reliable. Received on Thu Jul 06 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT