Re: Designing RAC Storage For A Small University

> RAC is a high availability solution. Do you need that much
> availability?

No, what we are more worried about is clustering for performance rather than availability. I want to build a cluster (oops, I guess they're called grids now) of small relatively inexpensive (3-4k) wintel boxes and demonstrate how it's both faster and cheaper than HP hunk of steel. If we have to shell out this much for a storage unit then it starts becoming not as much cheaper...

> One can configure a stand by database on a different server and fall
> over to that system pretty quickly if your primary server goes down.

This is our fallback plan if we can't get a real clustered solution working.

> There's a bunch of vendors out there that should be able to quote you
> prices and features for a minimal RAC configuration if that's
> absolutely what you want.

The sticky point is that we already have the servers as they're from other projects and were already acquired; the idea of clustering them is a recent one and so I began to investigate the requirements.

Riddle me this, though: there seem to be plenty of cheap NAS boxes out there like the HP ProLiant DL100 -
http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/dl100storageserver/ . This seems a much more reasonable price point. Will this work with an Oracle RAC? Or is RAC not even the only clustering option for Oracle servers?

As you can tell, I'm a bit lost in all this :-) Received on Fri Nov 04 2005 - 15:57:57 CST