I've often been asked what value the Sun Cluster 3.x software brings to Oracle 10g R2 RAC deployments when 10g already has a built-in cluster framework. The short answer is increased robustness, availability and, above all, data integrity. These qualities stem mainly from Sun Cluster's membership and failure fencing features that have been present in the product since its initial release.

To try and condense the all technical arguments behind these assertions into a suitable blog posting would be almost impossible. Instead, my colleagues and I have written a whitepaper that provides detailed technical information on the benefits of using Sun Cluster 3.x when deploying Oracle 10g R2 RAC databases. The whitepaper can be downloaded from the Sun web site.

Tim Read
Staff Engineer