Oracle 9i RAC is a scalable, highly-available, clustered database that runs efficiently on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and low-cost servers and storage. In December 2003, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Oracle RAC set the world record for the TPC-C benchmark, achieving over 1 million transactions per minute on a shared storage cluster of 16 industry servers. Users are scaling Oracle databases without incurring the equipment or support costs of large SMP servers.

Managing a shared storage hardware environment required by Oracle9i
RAC can be complex. Management issues include
1. A separate Oracle installation must be performed on each 9i RAC node.
More than 100,000 files must be installed on each node (this includes the Oracle Home and root directories)
Home and root directories must be separately managed for each node since these directories cannot be shared
2. Unless 9i RAC is deployed on top of a file system, a minimum of nine raw devices (one for each table space) must be managed, plus additional raw devices for user space.

Raw devices cannot be resized
Raw devices appear as “unused” space and can be inadvertently written over by other applications if proper care is not taken
Certain advanced Oracle features are not supported on raw disk (ONF, ELT, and I/O fencing for example)

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