Veritas Unveils Cluster System for Oracle RAC

Veritas Software Corp. has unveiled a cluster file system for Oracle Corp.s Oracle9i Real Application Clusters (RAC) on the HP-UX 11i platform, the company announced Thursday.

Veritas Database Edition/Advanced Cluster for Oracle9i Real Application Clusters is the industrys first cluster file system for the HP-UX 11i platform, according to Veritas officials, and is designed to help organizations manage Oracle9i RAC implementations on raw disk—in other words, those without cluster file systems.

Oracle9i RAC allows multiple servers to share a database. The idea behind RAC is to improve availability of mission-critical systems by having failed nodes automatically fail over to live nodes.

Experts say that traditional implementations of Oracle9i RAC on raw disk are fast but hard to manage. Administrators cant easily tell how much storage the database has eaten up, which makes routine database backup and recovery more difficult.

“While managing a fast-growing Oracle database environment is more difficult without a file system, many administrators believe raw disk is an acceptable alternative to enhance performance,” said Mark Shainman, an analyst at Meta Group, in a statement. “Customers should look for products that dont force them to choose between performance and manageability. An ideal alternative for Oracle9i RAC customers who demand both would be the management capability of a file system combined with the speed of raw disk.”

Thats where Veritas software can help, said officials of the Mountain View, Calif., company, as it provides high performance and manageability of a clustered Oracle database environment.

Veritas Database Edition/Advanced Cluster for Oracle9i Real Application Clusters starts at $11,395.