iTechNote

Jeffrey Hunter has published an insightful article about building an Oracle RAC 10g R2 Cluster with less than $1,800. If you are struggling to maintain an Oracle RAC at your work, do take a look. The system involved comprises a dual-node cluster (each with a single processor) running Linux (CentOS 4.2 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4) with a shared disk storage based on IEEE1394 (FireWire) drive technology.

The major cost cut is in the shared storage. Firewire (IEEE1394) is chosen as the shared storage for the system in favour of the hefty price tag for Fibre Channel ($10,000 or more) and SCSI ($2,000 - $5,000). Firewire was developed by Apple Computer and Texas Instruments as a cross-platform implementation of a high-speed serial data bus. The capabilities of IEEE1394 compare very favorably with other available disk interface technologies.

The guide gives a detail table of hardware components used for the system and their estimated price. The total adds up to $1,685. It is a three-page comprehensive guide to setup an Oracle RAC 10g R2 cluster for testing and development without costing a bomb.

It is important to note that this configuration should never be run in a production environment and that it is not supported by Oracle or any other vendor. In a production environment, fibre channel—the high-speed serial-transfer interface that can connect systems and storage devices in either point-to-point or switched topologies—is the technology of choice. FireWire offers a low-cost alternative to fibre channel for testing and development, but it is not ready for production.