When any vendor launches a product there is always skepticism on claims that we will have a database up and running on a brand new box in data center in under 2 hours. As every one know getting a RAC cluster built on enterprise hardware requires a lot of leg work. you need VLAN's , switch ports assigned . Built an interconnect architecture to meet Oracle Best practices .
In Short order it takes time to get brand new physical hardware up and running with a fully functional Oracle RAC Database. Cue the Oracle Database Appliance (ODA). The ODA is a new 2 physical nodes, 24 cores and 192GB with about 4.5 TB usable disk . The interconnect is built into the appliance, so only network connectivity needed is to the public network. Network ports are bonded and you get 1GB and 10GB ports .
The deployment procedure is simple and 8 step setup poster gets you a DB up and running.
The DB deployment and patching is handled thru the OAK command set. oakcli is used for deployments , patching , validation and diagnostics of the appliance.
We were able to get a working RAC DB on 2 nodes in about 60 minutes which was very impressive. I'm still playing around with the appliance and will post more cool features as i find them. The ODA seems to an ideal appliance for deploying small to medium databases pretty quickly.
