Simple cost/benefit and the systems upgrade

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Anecdotal evidence: This is the Nth time you use this particular setup of the two 690s as a basis for comparison between AIX/Power and Solaris/Whatever. As stated in another post the problems with that system has nothing to do with AIX but with design.

I can counter your anecdote with my own. A few years ago we had a similar situation. Sun Cluster(880s), Veritas, EMC Symmetrix and with Oracle Parallell Server(called RAC now) on top of that. Highly expensive hardware and software. It was diffucult to set up and maintenance was a pain. Performance was a real joke. Now I could, as in the Murph way, use this one setup as a reason for choosing AIX/Power or Linux/Intel instead of Solaris/SPARC. Or I could blame it on EMC. But I don't because it would be quite unfair. In fact I would call it dishonest.

A problem with RAC is that it doesn't scale well except for very marginal workloads. In most practical situations it scales negatively, an added server decreases performance. As for reliability, RAC can in theory give you an almost insignificant gain if you are willing to spend almost tenfold in man hours maintaining the system. But in practice RAC gives you more trouble and downtime. And then there is the great risk in getting stuck in a situation where upgrade is nearly impossible. As you have mentioned.

Btw. the solution for the above problem was to get rid of Veritas and OPS and split the system in an active/passive configuration(the DB2 way). No more performance problems or downtime.; Posted by: unix-admin Posted on: 03/04/09 (Edited: 03/04/2009 @ 06:39) You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use