Upgrade to big SUN box or RAC for data warehouse?

Our DW is running out of steam (Terabyte Database using Oracle 8) with Sun Enterprise 10000 box. Choices are to upgrade to a F12K or go RAC (we need to go to 9i anyway). I suspect many of the problems in the DW are due to poor IO throughput in the load, less so in the running of queries. Poor throughput since the IO system in the 10K box is not fast enough to ship data out to the NAS

I am quite keen on looking at RAC with perhaps a bunch of SUN V280 or 480's perhaps connected over GBE to NAS storage but others say that isn't a good architecture for a data warehouse and we need to buy big iron.

All the literature I can find suggests that clustering is a good thing - especially if you can parallel the load across multiple CPU's access the NAS over the network fabric. If you have one machine (no matter how many CPU's) aren't you then limited to the IO path that box has to the NAS? Plus large joins etc. could be dispersed to a number of different boxes for higher speed?

Any general ROT's here or is it quite application specific?

thanks

Larry Received on Tue Jul 22 2003 - 03:28:13 CDT