Build Your Own Oracle RAC 10g Release 2 Cluster on Linux and FireWire
by Jeffrey Hunter - OTN

RAC Clusters Shared-Storage Overview

Fibre Channel is one of the most popular solutions for shared storage. As I mentioned previously, Fibre Channel is a high-speed serial-transfer interface used to connect systems and storage devices in either point-to-point or switched topologies. Protocols supported by Fibre Channel include SCSI and IP.

Fibre Channel configurations can support as many as 127 nodes and have a throughput of up to 2.12 gigabits per second. Fibre Channel, however, is very expensive; the switch alone can start at US$1,000 and high-end drives can reach prices of US$300. Overall, a typical Fibre Channel setup (including cards for the servers) costs roughly US$8,000.

A less expensive alternative to Fibre Channel is SCSI. SCSI technology provides acceptable performance for shared storage, but for administrators and developers who are used to GPL-based Linux prices, even SCSI can come in over budget at around US$2,000 to US$5,000 for a two-node cluster.

Another popular solution is the Sun NFS (Network File System) found on a NAS. It can be used for shared storage but only if you are using a network appliance or something similar. Specifically, you need servers that guarantee direct I/O over NFS, TCP as the transport protocol, and read/write block sizes of 32K.