A How-to that Eliminates the Unpleasant Surprises
The task of installing a multi-node RAC cluster of Oracle 11g R2 on Solaris 10 with an EMC PowerPath has acquired the reputation of being a troublesome assignment. In the interests of sparing readers some of the tribulations, Dossy Shiobara has written a guide to the installation that gathers heretofore difficult to find suggestions in a single, how-to source.
Short Items of Interest on Sun Open Storage
For the Solaris SPARC and Solaris x64 Platforms
Veritas Storage Foundation by Symantec is a comprehensive solution for centralized heterogeneous online storage management from one screen. The latest version is 5.1 that offers several new features including zero reboot install and zero reboot upgrade, fully automated Solid State Drive (SSD) optimization, continued focus on enabling a full Thin Provisioning ecosystem, and support for Oracle 11g R2 RAC.
Beats IBM Performance by 26%, HP’s by 87% 
Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 Server Cluster is number one in the Top Ten TPC-C List by Performance as of Nov. 24, 2009. Using 12 Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 servers, 60 Sun Storage F5100 Flash arrays and Oracle 11g Enterprise Edition with Real Application Clusters (RAC) and Partitioning, Sun delivered a world record TPC-C benchmark result of 7,646,486.7 tpmC and $2.36 $/tpmC (USD). TPC-C is an online transaction processing (OLTP) benchmark.
Scalability and Reliability Lead French Radio Broadcaster to Sun Technologies 
Needing to completely rebuild its Windows-based Web portal and ASP.NET-based applications to support a larger audience with new services, radio broadcaster RTL France began shopping around for a cost-effective, energy-efficient, and easy to manage IT environment that would be reliable and scalable. Open source solutions were its preference. RTL France decided to build a new portal infrastructure using Sun CoolThreads and x64 servers, running Solaris 10. For its applications, Sun GlassFish Enterprise Server proved fast and scalable.
