Re: RAC on Mac News

Billy wrote:
> Well, I think everyone here is kind of missing the point. Or actually
> attacking having a go at the wrong thing here.
>
> Come on! Rac on OS/X (on G5's I assume)? Aw pleaazee... You can build a
> better and cheaper Linux cluster using AMD Opterons. And dealing with a
> bunch of Mad Mac'ers..? Sheez! :-)
>
> Daniel, are these G5's? What was used for shared storage? Firewire or
> something more sophistcated? And what was used for Interconnect? Would
> love to hear the technical details on this config.
>
> ---
> Billy

NOTE: The following is in direct response to your post and in no way intended as a promotion. My answers are directly responsive to what you wrote: And nothing more.

Actually you can't so I have no idea where you are getting your information. Here's the reality as of March 28th of this year.

Sun Fire V20z
dual AMD 252 CPUs, 4GB RAM, 2x73GB SCSI, rails, 3 yr. hardware support, 3 yr. Redhat support, no FireWire available list price $16,051

or for a slight saving:

HP DL385
dual 252 AMD CPUs, 4GB RAM, 2x73GB SCSI, rails, 3 yr. support, no FireWire list price $14,194

do you really think the above equates to:

Apple Xserve G5
dual 2.3GHz CPUs, 4GB RAM, 2x80GB SATA, rails, 3 yr. hardware, 3 yr. AppleCare
list price $7,348

One can knock almost $2,000 off the G5 price by using a headless cluster node.

FireWire for storage? Hardly ... that wouldn't qualify for Oracle support. What has NetApp and EMC scared is the following:

Xserve RAID 5.6TB in 14 hot swap drives
2Gb Fibre Channel
Dual XOR engines
list price $12,999

If you'd love to hear the technical details ... ask specific questions. But white papers have been submitted to OTN for publication and should appear in a few months.

-- 
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)