Oracle Tips by Burleson

10g Grid Computing with RAC
Real Application Cluster Architecture

Cluster Private Interconnect

The cluster interconnect is a high bandwidth, low latency communication facility that connects each node to other nodes in the cluster and routes messages among the nodes. It is a key component in building the RAC system.

In case of RAC database, the cluster interconnect is used for the following high-level functions:

• Monitoring Health, Status, and Synchronize messages
   

• Transporting lock management or resource coordination messages
   

• Moving the Cache Buffers (data blocks) from node to node.

High performance database computing involves distributing the processing across an array of cluster nodes. It requires that the cluster interconnect provide high-data rates and low-latency communication between node processes.

Interconnect technology that is employed connecting RAC Nodes should be scalable to handle the amount of traffic generated by the cache synchronization mechanism (which is directly related to the amount of contention created by the application). The more inter-instance updates and inter-instance transfers, the more message traffic it generates. It is advisable to implement the highest bandwidth, lowest latency interconnect that is available for a given platform.

The volume of synchronization traffic directly impacts the bandwidth requirement, and messaging delays are highly dependant on the IPC protocol. The interconnect is not something that you should risk having under configured, assuming scalability is a key objective.

Oracle recommends that for Linux environments the interconnect bandwidth is of 1GB Ethernet, use the UDP as IPC protocol in preference to TCP. 10g has extended support for emerging technologies like Infiniband, which will greatly improve interconnect scalability (and standardization) for large numbers of nodes, as well as provide a choice of interconnects under Linux.

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