Re: RAC on Mac News

From: DA Morgan <damorgan_at_psoug.org>
Date: Wed, 18 May 2005 12:08:32 -0700
Message-ID: <1116443053.843893@yasure>

Billy wrote:
> DA Morgan wrote:
>

>>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.

>
>
> Hey! Don't take that tone with me! ;-)
>
> Daniel, I could not care less about the so-called marketing slant about
> your posting. Personally I think it is bullshit (knowing your take on
> posting commercial stuff here).
>
>

>>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

>
>
> Are you sure that is accurate? We recently bought 36 of these and they
> were closer to $6,000 a pop than $16,000.

Ah but did you include 16 rail kits at $250 each? How about 16 support licenses with RedHat at $2,800/yr. each? etc. All prices are "list" and off of the manufacturer's web sites. Of course all of them give discounts. But yes the numbers are accurate as of the date sited.

>>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

>
> Well, I would respond to that just how stable and robust mature a
> relatively newcomer to the cluster market is. Apple does not strike me
> as a strong competitor in the server market. Especially in the more
> complex clustering market.

Strikes me as extremely strong. These are not new servers. What is new is Oracle providing a Mac version of the RDBMS. Oracle support will absolutely stand behind this hardware-o/s combination and I have guarantees that they will support up to, IIRC, an 80 node cluster. Remember clustering is an Oracle product and has nothing to do with the understanding hardware. RAC runs, ASM runs, DataGuard runs, etc.

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

>
> Now this sounds good.. EMC is horribly expensive. And its bin file
> makes me scared. ;-)

And their support people should terrify you. They have a very good product. But their support, at least on this part of the planet is a nightmare.

>>If you'd love to hear the technical details ... ask specific

>
> questions.
>
> Interconnect h/w? Using OCS or ASM, or mix of both?

OCFS has not been ported but storage can be RAW or ASM or NFS to a NetApp and no doubt NFS to an EMC but I have yet to personally verify this. If you look at the demo hardware I used at Battelle PNL you will see the two G5s are simultaneously connected to both the Apple Xserve RAID and also to a NetApp FAS270. Storage is definitely not an issue.

> --
> Billy

HTH

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

Received on Wed May 18 2005 - 14:08:32 CDT