Oracle 9i RAC deploys a shared disk cluster in which the database can be run across multiple servers. If a node fails, the workload is transferred to another node. Adding addition server horsepower doesn't require altering the application or reconfiguring the data.
Based on the evidence presented by Oracle during my sojourn at Oracle World this week, the company is making some headway. According to an Oracle spokesperson, the company has 850 RAC customers as of this quarter, with about 200 of them in production. Overall, Oracle claims it has 200,000 database customers worldwide, so the journey has just begun.
The company is supplying profiles in clustering courage, and I spoke with one of the early adopters, Kerry Schwab, senior manager of interactive marketing at Southwest Airlines. Schwab's goal this summer was to upgrade the airline's Rapid Rewards frequent-flyer program from Oracle8i to 9i and to take advantage of the clustering option for high availability.
"We wanted to hook up Rapid Rewards to the reservation system, so that flight and rewards data are linked," Schwab said. Creating the real-time connection allows customers to have their personal information such as name and address, as well as Rapid Rewards data, automatically filled in when reservations or other queries are made. To deliver a consistent experience for customers, the Rapids Reward system would need to be as reliable as the reservation system, which is run on a stalwart mainframe.
Prior to the upgrade, the Rapid Rewards system suffered downtime from 20 minutes to an hour due to network card failures or installing upgrade patches, Schwab said.
"Based on the fact that we needed the application to be as highly available as the mainframe, it [Oracle9i RAC] was a good value compared to the alternatives--a Tandem NonStop Himalaya server or mainframe," Schwab said.
Besides the hardware costs, including Fujitsu PrimePower Servers (PP 600) and Network Appliance Filers for storage, the clustering option for 9i was an incremental 50 percent of the standard Oracle database cost. And Schwab got a lot of help from Oracle and Network Appliance consultants to pull of the two-month project. Your implementation costs may vary.
The prognosis for Oracle9i RAC? It is Oracle's future. The company plays in many other areas, including back office applications, collaboration software, and middleware, but it's the database that drives the company's overall strategy and perspective.
According to Mark Jarvis, Oracle senior vice president and chief marketing officer, integration should be done on a data level. Deploying a single, consolidated database for all applications and data types is Oracle's way to leverage its strength and tell an ease of integration story.
In his keynote at OracleWorld, Ellison touted Oracle's own database consolidation efforts and focus on packaged business application software as an example of reducing costs and complexity. Ellison said corporations have collectively squandered billions of dollars on consultants and staff over the last decade to maintain a jumble of disparate systems.
Whether customers want a complete top to bottom Oracle solution to purportedly save costs and reduce complexity is another story. It may work for some, but ideally Oracle will play the good corporate citizen and make sure that it database, business applications and application server work well with other vendors' products, and take full advantage of the emerging Web services standards.
The problem isn't that there are too many vendors--it's that they don't make it easy for their frequently competing products to work together. Perhaps that is too high an obstacle to overcome. It may be that over time only few vendors, with comprehensive integrated solutions, will exist.
For now, however, customers want to see if they can take what they have spent all those billions on and get it to work. The problem isn't so much about being locked into any particular vendor solution. It's about being locked out of getting your critical information when and where you want it.
It's about time for the vendors like Oracle and IT buyers to resolve this problem together.
Do you think Oracle's RAC system can make it the real world? Would consider RAC for your company? TalkBack below or e-mail me at dan.farber@cnet.com.
