ISS Technology Update, Volume 7 Number 5 - Newsletter

ISS Technology Update Volume 7, Number 5
15
The HP/Oracle “RAC in a box” solution
The issue that is common to active/passive and active/active clusters is the complexity of the hardware infrastructure. System
installation, deployment, and management can be complicated and expensive, especially for an SMB customer. The solution is
to use a combination of HP c-Class BladeSystem technology, Linux OS, and Oracle RAC (Figure 5-3). The major advantages of
the HP/Oracle RAC in a box solution are summarized in Table 3.
Figure 5-3. HP/Oracle RAC in a box
AiO SB600c
Storage Blade
AiO SB600c
Storage Blade
BL460c Server
Node #1
BL460c Server
Node #2
c3000 Tower
Enclosure
BL260c Server
Quorum/App
Table 5-3. HP/Oracle RAC in a box
Advantages
Easy to deploy
• Everything is in one chassis (HP BladeSystem c3000 or c7000 enclosure)
• Configuration and best practices are provided.
Easy to manage • Storage can be set up easily using the AiO SB600c intuitive interface. It
allows simple setup of LUNs, which can be served to the clients using iSCSI,
NFS or a combination of both.
• All of the components are stored within the enclosure, reducing wiring
complexity and costs.
• The only external cables are Ethernet for connectivity and power.
Highly available • There is no single point of failure in the hardware because the blade
enclosure has a totally passive backplane.
• Dual power supplies and fans ensure availability.
• Two Real Application Cluster nodes provide compute availability.
• The BL260c provides application server and cluster quorum capability.
• ASM is used to mirror database files across AiO SB600c storage devices.
Lower cost
• Internal NAS storage is less expensive than an external SAN.
Easily expandable
• Additional external NAS can be added.
• Additional SAN capacity can be added.
• Additional server nodes can be added.