Dedicated switches needed for RAC interconnect or not?
Currently working on an Extended RAC cluster design implementation, I asked the network engineer for dedicated switches for the RAC interconnects.
Here is a little background:
There are 28 RAC clusters over 2X13 physical RAC nodes with separate Oracle_Home for each instance with atleast 2+ instances on each RAC node. So 13 RAC nodes will be in each site(Data-Center). This is basically an Extended RAC solution for SAP databases on RHEL 6 using ASM and Clusterware for Oracle 11gR2. The RAC nodes are Blades in a c7000 enclosure (in each site). The distance between the sites is 55+ kms.
Oracle recommends to have Infiniband(20GBps) as the network backbone, but here DWDM will be used with 2X10 Gbps (each at 10 GBps) links for the RAC interconnect between the sites. There will be separate 2x1GBps redundant link for the Production network and 2x2 GBps FC(Fiber-Channel) redundant links for the SAN/Storage(ASM traffic will go here) network. There will be switches for the Public-production network and the SAN network each.
Oracle recommends dedicated switches(which will give acceptable latency/bandwith) with switch redundancy to route the dedicated/non-routable VLANs for the RAC interconnect (private/heartbeat/global cache transfer) network. Since the DWDM interlinks is 2x10Gbps - do I still need the dedicated switches?
If yes, then how many?
Your inputs will be greatly appreciated.. and help me take a decision.
Many Thanks in advance..
Abhijit