Hey,

We are considering to deploy an ORACLE 10g shared-storage cluster
(guarded by RAC) with 3,000 transaction/sec! The consulting team
provides three alternatives:

[1] 2x IBM hs40 Servers (4x Xeon 3.0G + 16G RAM) + 2 x IBM hs20
Servers (2 x Xeon 3.6G + 16G RAM) running RH 3.0 AS
[2] 4x Sun V40z Servers (4x Opteron + 16G RAM) with Solaris 9 for X86

To me I acctually prefer choice 2 as IBM's system prices extremely
high these days and nearly no reference on the market for certain
database usage. However, management requires rock-hard evidence Sun
superceeds IBM on this database run. Can any experienced Sun
architects or testers help to tell:

[1] whether Sun V40z servers can run stably with Oracle 10g clusters
sustaining similar ebiz site with high volume of database access
[2] can aforementioned alternative 2 be replaced by Sun V480 server
clusters ( 4x 1.2G SPARC III + 16 G RAM)

Thanks!

LW

Sting wrote:
> Hey,
>
> We are considering to deploy an ORACLE 10g shared-storage cluster
> (guarded by RAC) with 3,000 transaction/sec! The consulting team
> provides three alternatives:
>
> [1] 2x IBM hs40 Servers (4x Xeon 3.0G + 16G RAM) + 2 x IBM hs20
> Servers (2 x Xeon 3.6G + 16G RAM) running RH 3.0 AS
> [2] 4x Sun V40z Servers (4x Opteron + 16G RAM) with Solaris 9 for X86
>
> To me I acctually prefer choice 2 as IBM's system prices extremely
> high these days and nearly no reference on the market for certain
> database usage. However, management requires rock-hard evidence Sun
> superceeds IBM on this database run. Can any experienced Sun
> architects or testers help to tell:
>
> [1] whether Sun V40z servers can run stably with Oracle 10g clusters
> sustaining similar ebiz site with high volume of database access
> [2] can aforementioned alternative 2 be replaced by Sun V480 server
> clusters ( 4x 1.2G SPARC III + 16 G RAM)
>
> Thanks!
>
> LW


To address your questions on the Opteron servers vs the Xeon servers.
The Opteron has proved to be a much faster than Xeon in workloads
where you have cache misses and the processor has to go to main
memory. The northbridge is such a bottleneck on a 4 way Xeon system
that you get really bad efficiency, not to mention the penalty you get
from having such a long pipeline in branch predictions. The Opteron
(like UlraSPARC III) has a memory controller built into every CPU and
every CPU you add also adds memory bandwidth.

If you have a 4 way systems with 16GB of RAM you'll want to be using a
64-bit CPU and OS since with that much memory running a 32-bit
database is a waste of memory. That being the case Solaris 9 x86
won't provide you with a 64-bit OS and you'll need to look at RedHat
or Suse. You could migrate to Solaris 10 when it comes out with a
64-bit x86 kernel.

So the choice for 64-bit CPU and OS is SPARC or Opteron. The Opteron
will be faster. But if you have a preference toward Solaris then you
should consider the SPARC. If you are really concerned about price
the V440 would be a better deal for you than the V480. I did a quick
sizing and made a lot of assumptions but you could probably run that
workload on a pair of V480's, V490's or V440's and it would definitely
run on a pair of V40z's.

You may also want to look very carefully at your choice of disk array
and how it is setup.

Elias