Real Application Clusters and the Grid architecture are Oracle's
strategy for scaling out enterprise systems to cope with higher and
higher workloads and more and more users. The premise of Grid is simple:
it works just like a utility (e.g. electricity) grid. You don't care
which "station" you get your data from as long as you get it, and if one
station goes down then it's just fetched from somewhere else without the
user being any the wiser. As demand grows you just add another cheap
2-CPU Intel machine (running Linux) to the cluster.
While the premise is simple, the technology and the reality of its
implementation is complex. Therefore many books are limited to talking
conceptually and theoretically about the RAC technology. This book,
however, will be the first to show how to actually implement and
administer an Oracle 10g Real Application Cluster (RAC) system in a
Linux environment. Based on extensive real world experience gained with
Fortune 500 companies, this book discusses: basic concepts underlying
Linux and Oracle RAC, design strategies, hardware procurement and
configuration and many more.