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@xxxxxxxxxxx
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@xxxxxxxxxxx> 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@xxxxxxxxxxx
>> Cell: 917-574-1858
>> Phone: 212-358-8211 x 359
>> http://www.gridapp.com
>>
>
>
>
>       =09
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