What Is Oracle Real Application Clusters 10G?

Oracle Real Application Clusters is an option of Oracle Database that was first introduced with Oracle 9i.Oracle Real Application Clusters is now proven technology used by thousands of customers in every industry in every type of application. Oracle RAC provides option for scaling applications beyond the capabilities of a single server. This allows customers to take advantage of lower cost commodity hardware to reduce their total cost of ownership and provide a scalable computing environment that supports their application workload. Oracle RAC provides the ability to remove the server as a single point of failure in any database application environment.

Real Application Clusters Architecture

A RAC database is a clustered database. A cluster is a group of independent servers that cooperate as a single system .Clusters provide improved fault resilience and modular incremental system growth over single symmetric multiprocess(SMP) systems. In the event of a system failure,clustering ensures high availability to users. Access to mission critical data is not lost. Redundant hardware components such as additional nodes,interconnects and disks allow the cluster to provide high availability. Such redundant hardware architectures avoid single points-of-failure and provide exceptional fault resilience. With Real Application Clusters,we de-couple the Oracle Instance (the processes and memory structures running on a server to allow access to the data) from the Oracle database(the physical structures residing on storage which actually hold the data,commonly known as data files). A clustered database is a single database that can be accessed by multiple instances. Each instance runs on a separate server in the cluster. When additional resources are required, additional nodes and instances can be easily added to the cluster with no downtime. Once the new instance is started, application using services can immediately take advantages of it with no changes to the application or application server.

Oracle Clusterware

Oracle provides Oracle Clusterware, a portable clusterware solution that is integrated and designed specifically for Oracle Database. You no longer have to purchase third party clusterware in order to have a RAC database. Oracle Clusterware monitors and manages Real Application Cluster databases. When a node in the cluster is started, all instances,listeners and services are automatically started. If an instance fails the clusterware will automatically restart the instance so the service is often restored before the administer notices it was down.

Hardware Architecture

Oracle Real Application Clusters is shared everything architecture. All servers in the cluster must share all storage used for a RAC database. The type of disk storage used can be network attached storage(NAS),storage area network(SAN), or SCSI disk. Your storage choice is dictated by the server hardware choice and what your hardware vendor supports. Choosing a storage system that will provide scalable I/O for your application an I/O system that will scale as additional servers are added to the cluster.

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