Further Reading
See also:
RAC is now a well established product and we have developed a standardized install process which:
- is based on industry best practices and best known methods,
- minimizes the complexity and the elapsed time of the installation,
- produces a standard and repeatable database architecture,
- incorporates our experiences with RAC customers over the past four years.
In other words, whilst you could hire a consultant to manually go through the installation with you, we offer a streamlined approach minimising professional time, time spent by your DBAs and yet giving you a fully working and documented RAC system.
Hardware
Of course Oracle RAC doesn't work in isolation as it requires dedicated hardware: servers, SAN, networking etc. In fact, this is where much of the complexity of RAC installations begin.
RAC as a concept is simple but, as anyone who has installed will understand that there are many layers of software that have to work in unison. You must have the right combination of operating system, drivers, clusterware, database software and patches. Valuable hours can be lost resolving even minor incompatibilities. Errors can manifest themselves in many ways: during the install process (OUI can crash or may be unable to link the Oracle binaries), during the ASM or database instance creation stage or, by far the worst as it has the most serious consequences for a production system, after the database is up and running.
Having been through these hoops many times, we are also offering what we call 'Tried & Tested' configurations. These are sets of hardware, OS and drivers which have been proven to work together for numerous RAC customers
Operating System
We see most RAC systems today being impletented on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Oracle Unbreakable Linux and so this is the focus for our streamlined install process. However we also have considerable experience on Sun Solaris and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 so can help with this as part of our Custom Installation service.
Oracle licences & support
Typically customers implement RAC as a new system, either for an entirely new project, or migrating their existing application over from older hardware. This usually entails a purchase of new Oracle licences or migration of existing licences (typically with the purchase of the RAC Option if they were Enterprise Edition).
As part of Veriton Limited, a trusted Oracle Partner established over 10 years ago, we can supply all the required database licences and Oracle Updates/Support.
A single fixed-priced, fixed timescale
By combining hardware, software licences and our streamlined install process we are able to offer a fixed price on a complete RAC system: a new package that we call RAC-in-a-BOX.