On 07/26/2006 09:10:03 PM, Mark Brinsmead wrote: > > A more relevant question to ask is whether the customer actually *needs* > RAC. Or 8 CPUs. If they had not done enough research to know whether the > storage layer they had chosen would even work, then chances are, they have > not sized the hardware nor adequately researched the requirements for RAC, > either. Horizontal scaling is also known as crucifixion. RAC implementation without careful planning and analysis is just that. > > If you're *certain* that you *must* use NAS (NFS), then be certain you do > your homework when choosing your other components. (Oops. That's how we > got here, isn't it?) Redhat cannot (yet) support Asynch I/O with NFS -- the > same may be true of other supported Linux distros, but I'm not certain. > Perhaps you could use Solaris? [Ooh! Wouldn't *that* annoy IBM... ;-) ] Asynch I/O is not that important. Oracle can emulate it using I/O slaves. Granted, it's not as good as the real thing, but you will not sufer much, either. Direct I/O is much more important and it is supported. FC5 is the sign of things to come. It does support full NFS4 version, with cient caching and async I/O included. EL5 is likely to have those features, minus bugs, discovered by free beta testers, like me. -- Mladen Gogala http://www.mgogala.com -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l