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November 26, 2009 2:07 PM

Oracle / Storage geeks: What are the alternatives to exadata for high-performance I/O with a rac system?

We are getting pretty close to buying an exadata setup and I'm trying to find viable alternatives that are cost-effective and deliver similar performance. We need to be running RAC for load balancing and fault tolerance, so I believe direct attached storage like SSD-arrays is not an option. Buying a dedicated SAN seems to be lower performance and higher cost than exadata. For benchmarking the exadata system we are looking at (1/4 rack) delivers 4.5GB/sec sustained I/O to disk. Our current SAN (which is overly shared) gives us approx 150MB/sec and our 4-nic dnfs systems to a netapp runs at approx 350MB/sec.

So assuming we need at least 3GB/sec and it cant be direct-attached what are other good options out there?

Lets just ignore the other features of exadata that make it fast like smart-scan. Thanks!

posted by H. Roark to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

I am not the database expert in my company, but I do know that in the past we've run a system where UNDO/REDO space lives on this, with backing storage on SAN. We were kind of on the cutting edge with all of that, but it does look like they are getting into a more packaged solution, for example a RAC/SSD setup. This book seems to talk about the more custom solutions such as the one we ran. Here's a blog discussing RAC/SSD.

Also, if you're using a RAC make sure you're going over the interconnect for as little as possible - application partitioning, writing to one node, etc.
posted by true at 6:42 PM on November 26, 2009