CEO's Connection
Are You Another Casualty of the Oracle RAC War?
by Rob Gardos, CEO
Are You Another Casualty of the Oracle RAC War?
There are big benefits to having a clustered database infrastructure. Pooling together the processing power of inexpensive, commodity servers to do the work of a big box is cost effective, incrementally scalable and inherently highly available. So what is holding back the proliferation of Oracle RAC? Can't I deploy and manage this cluster just like a Web server farm? Isn't that the whole point?
Well unfortunately it's not that easy. The average customer can spend months simply getting Oracle RAC installed. And it doesn't stop with deployment. Administration is more complex (harder to manage many boxes then one box) and scaling a RAC cluster is almost as difficult as deploying it in the first place.
That could be one of the reasons why the vast majority of RAC databases in production are 2-node clusters. With all this complexity the wonderful grid story that Oracle paints suddenly becomes a lot less wonderful and a lot more burdensome. Beyond all of these issues, Oracle has given us a moving target to work with as versions of Oracle RAC on 9i, 10gR1 and 10gR2 are vastly different, each with its own series of complexities and headaches. All this results in a battle that DBAs inevitably must go through (many of whom will lose) to make Oracle RAC into a usable part of the infrastructure. The RAC allure is powerful, but no one wants to get involved with another war, especially when they're out fighting fires.
If you run a large enterprise you may be better equipped to deal with the pain. A large pool of DBAs and countless lab environments makes the RAC war much more manageable. But how about companies that don't have these luxuries? Can you really afford to buy into the hype when being asked to blindly rely on some poorly trained Oracle support engineer to help you when you need it? Your small number of DBAs are doing everything they can to keep the ship afloat. The last thing you need is to have them spend weeks on end with support, throwing darts in the dark.
As a result, for many organizations the answer to RAC has been no. For the ones that took a chance, the results have been lukewarm and typically driven by the talent of the consultant hired. In all cases, people quickly realized that the rules that apply to scaling Web farms and application servers simply don't apply to the database.
What too few IT organizations know is that there are resources and solutions for getting RAC up and running in the right way from the start, as well as for ongoing management without major expertise. These solutions, such as GridApp's Clarity management software, understand the unique nature of the database, and their users can benefit from this deep expertise. The biggest mistake is assuming you're going to get these solutions from Oracle. Remember: Oracle 9i was released by 2000 and if anything, RAC's complexity has grown.
So unfortunately, for many by the end of the process (assuming the system is actually working), the typical customer will actually manage its RAC cluster more like a big box than a distributed and flexible next generation architecture. If that's the case you may have won the battle but I'm not sure why you bothered fighting the war.
Robert Gardos
President and CEO
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