Re: RAC on Mac News

DA Morgan wrote:

> > 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.

These were mounted in existing RAC cabinets. So no railings needed. There were no hidden extras either. We got RHES WS for the majority and RHES AS for about a dozen. I think that the total cost per V20z was far under $10,000 (including RH and additional Infiniband h/w and SAN connectivity h/w per node).

> > 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.

Accept that. But Apple Mac servers of the past ran OS/9. OS/X (although build on a mature o/s) is a new comer on the Mac hardware. There were more than a fair share of teething problems with it. The G5 CPU does not compare ito price & performance with AMD or Intel (as benchmarks have shown). The AMD 64bit CPUs are impressive to say the least.

> > 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.

Well, I can also add a few comments about Sun support (like installing a high speed PCI card into a low speed shared PCI bus slot)... but then having a foot in the support environment myself for many years now, I also know that it often depends on the actual support people you deal with. I've had some very good experiences with Oracle support - with others telling me just how terrible theirs were.

> 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.

Have heard that OCFS 2 will be available for Solaris.. Would like to see it myself on HP-UX though.

> 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.

Sounds good. But hey, no urges this side to swap my Sunfire V20z cluster for a G5 cluster. :-)

--
Billy