SFRAC: any future plans for customers to opt out Oracle CRS when using SFRAC ?
Earlier in oracle 8i oracle parallel server and oracle 9i RAC, veritas DBAE and SFRAC(CFS) supported Oracle OPS/RAC
Oracle clusterware (CRS) was not available then. Hence customers had to pay only one clustering stack licensing fee.
CFS everyone agrees is very pricey specially when you have multiple CPUs and is very robust.
Now with 10g and 11g Oracle CRS clusterware is a must even if customer wants to use Veritas SFRAC.
This becomes double pricey, because customer will have to pay high licensing cost for Oracle EE RAC as well as Veritas SFRAC
As a result many customers are moving to Oracle CRS solution alone.
Are there any plans as part of joint effort between Symantec and Oracle for customers to opt out Oracle CRS when using SFRAC?
Or when using SFRAC as primary cluster ware even though CRS is a must, not having to pay RAC licensing fee to Oracle ?
eventhough SFRAC and CFS is very robust I think symantec will eventually lose the entire Oracle RAC market unless something is done to this effect
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Have you looked at using CFS with single instance Oracle (instead of RAC). This provides significantly reduced failover times (although not zero downtime) without the additional expense and complexity of RAC?
customers use RAC primarily to support high transaction rates, better utilization of servers (A/A), capabilit to use low to medium end servers to support high OLTP rates ( without having to use enterprise class servers ) and ofcourse quick recovery in the case of failures.
you can put a 4 node RAC cluster with 4 cpus each and achieve same or better performance than an enterprise class HP super dome or Sun SF15k/M8000 etc
Single instance Oracle with CFS will still have only one instance of oracle running. You are reducing failover time by using CFS. But the time to failover filesystems, disk groups etc is very negligible in overall failover time which is mostly dependent on oracle crash recovery time.
CFS is a good idea, but implementing CFS with single instance oracle doesnt meet the customer objectives for which RAC is purposed which is mainly performance and use of low to med class servers to achieve same performance as using an enterprise class high end server.
It is very difficult to convince management and decision makers and specially DBAs advantages of SFRAC serving as clusterware over Oracle CRS and ASM when Oracle pushes for CRS/ASM and DBA themselves are comfortable with oracle only RAC solution ( not SFRAC)
Pricing is also an issue when chasing SFRAC since we have to pay RAC licensing anyway to oracle.
I have searched all over the internet but there is no good technical white paper comparing SFRAC to Oracle RAC for Oracle RAC implementation.
there are no benchmarking results available either.
In the last two banking customers I have worked they were already moving to Oracle CRS only RAC solution
Martin:
Thanks for hooking up with me via email so that I can provide you with SFRAC/CRS/ASM information.
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