Oracle on v40z vs Oracle on v490

Hello everyone!

    At the moment we have several RAC systems (Sun Fire V440, 4xUltraSparc IIIi-1062 MHz each, Oracle 10.1.0.4, up to 6 nodes). We are going to upgrade that hardware, and have now two options: to use Sun Fire V40z with dual-core AMD Opteron CPU, or to replace theses boxes with Sun Fire V490 with UltraSparc IV+.

    Some time ago we tested Oracle on V20z (2xAMD 875, 2.2 GHz) in comparision with our V440s, and found out, that AMD system is almost three tims faster than a v440. So, if we use v40z with 4xAMD 880 (2.4 GHz), we can expect up to 5.4 times performance improvement (3 times per core, and multiply by 1.8 - the second cores "weight").

    But we know nothing about Oracle performance on UltraSparc IV+. SUN says, UltraSparc IV+ 1500 is UP TO 5 times faster than UltraSparc III. I've traied to find any real examples, but didn't find any... So i have two questions (really two blocks of questions :)) )

1. Has anyone a Oracle 10g RAC system on an AMD-based server, with Linux64? Is that system reliable enough? What are you using as a shared storage? Has anyone any real experience with OCFS2?
2. Has anyone tested Oracle 10g RAC on Sun UltraSparc IV+ servers? What is your impression? Are these servers really 5 times faster than UltraSparc IIIi?

    If reliability and performance of an AMD system will be, at least, not worse, than the mentioned Sparc system, then v40z seems much more preferable for us - $40k per box looks much better than $90k for one UltraSparc box.

Any useful information will be very appreciated...

Alexey Sergeyev
saefido7_at_devexperts.com Received on Thu Oct 27 2005 - 05:09:01 CDT