Reference Platform
To illustrate the benefits of implementing preinstalled, ready-to-deploy clustered database systems, we focus on the soon-to-be released Cluster Database Platform 280/3 (CDP 280/3).
Hardware
The hardware for our reference platform consists of the following:
two Sun Fire™ 280R servers
one Sun Fire V120 management server (follow-up to Netra™ t1 AC200 server)
two mirrored Sun StorEdge™ T3 arrays, all mounted in a 72-inch Sun StorEdge expansion cabinet
Everything ships from the factory already installed and cabled in the cabinet, reducing the time previously required to ensure that all components were connected and communicating properly.
As expected, the entire system ships with redundancy already factored into the design. For example, the cluster has dual, private interconnects between the Sun Fire 280R server nodes, and the public network interface is ready to be configured into a failover group. Each Sun StorEdge™ T3 array contains a hot spare disk to improve data recovery times in case of a disk failure.
The management server ships as a pre-installed JumpStart™ server; each Sun Fire 280R server cluster node arrives with no operating environment installed and is a JumpStart client ready to be installed.
Software
The key software components for our reference platform consist of the following:
Solaris™ 8 Operating Environment (Solaris OE)
Sun™ Cluster 3.0 software
Oracle9i Release 1 with Real Application Clusters (RAC, previously referred to as ORACLE Parallel Server)
Solaris Volume Manager software (previously known as Solstice DiskSuite™ software)
VERITAS Volume Manager™ (VxVM software)