Re: 10g RAC without vendor clusterware

Well, see, here's the thing. I don't believe in third-party=20 clusterware for RAC. At all.

In fact, I don't believe in RAC on large UNIX boxes. I think it misses=20=

the point.

This is almost straight out of my standard talking-to-an-analyst spiel,=20=

but here it is - RAC's achilles heel is its complexity. The only=20 reason the Sun/IBM big box teams have any justification at all for=20 their servers as an Oracle delivery platform is that RAC is hard to get=20=

working, hard to understand, and hard to manage.

The reason for that isn't just the new architecture - its that there=20 are now additional moving parts. There's clusterware, possible volume=20=

managers, possibly clustered filesystems, not to mention a different=20 configuration and deployment process. All of that means complexity,=20 which means time, which means money.

When the clusterware is provided by a third-party - when its an=20 addition vendor, a new version of an old software, its one more moving=20=

part that has, in one way or another, been shoehorned into Oracle. On=20=

top of that, the different clusterware technologies start to introduce=20=

their own requirements above and beyond what oracle requires. More=20 complexity.

And for the privilege of that additional complexity, the third-party=20 asks you to hand out additional money upfront, and every year=20 thereafter for support.

Oracle's clusterware, for 9i, is very stable. CRS - not so much so. =20 To answer your specific questions, the problems we see currently=20 revolve around the cluster occasionally hanging under specific=20 circumstances - note that the cluster hang does not mean the database=20 is unavailable, it just means that our neat "allocate processing power=20=

on the fly" functionality doesn't work. The other problem is that the=20=

CRS can occasionally reboot individual nodes in the cluster.

I'm not arguing that CRS is a better product than, say, Veritas=20 advanced edition for RAC. I'm arguing that it costs less, both in the=20=

short and long-term.

And yes, Oracle is fixing these problems. Are our customers 24 x 7=20 with these problems? It really depends on your definition of 24 x 7. =20 Is their application up and available and the system manageable all the=20=

time? Yes.

Thanks,
Matt

--
Matthew Zito
GridApp Systems
Email: mzito_at_gridapp.com
Cell: 917-574-1858
Phone: 212-358-8211 x 359
http://www.gridapp.com


On Feb 15, 2005, at 11:06 AM, Martic Zoran wrote:



> When you said annoying bugs are they causing Oracle to

> be down from time to time?

>

> Do you have all critical patches for these bugs from

> Oracle that are making Oracle HA as much as possible?

>

> We today had Oracle sales person proposing to not use

> cluster vendor SW, but I said do not know any big

> customer who is 24x7 on that.

>

> Are you fully 24x7 operational with these

> fixed/unresolved bugs?

>

> Thanks,

> Zoran

>

>

> --- Matthew Zito <mzito_at_gridapp.com> wrote:

>

>>

>> Our customers only deploy on the Oracle 10g

>> clusterware.  There are a

>> number of annoying CRS bugs, but what we're hearing

>> is that most/all of

>> these are going to be fixed in 10gR2.  How true that

>> is, we'll see.

>>

>> Thanks,

>> Matt

>>

>> --

>> Matthew Zito

>> GridApp Systems

>> Email: mzito_at_gridapp.com

>> Cell: 917-574-1858

>> Phone: 212-358-8211 x 359

>> http://www.gridapp.com

>>

>

>

>

> 	=09

> __________________________________

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