The typical New Zealand business is not on scale with a World Wide enterprise that would that would deploy a large scale geographically separated RAC environment. While businesses do have a requirement for high availability and scalability any RAC solution comes at a high cost for the typical NZ firm. Since there is little room for error the identification of solution requirements and a full solution package is critical when deploying a successful Oracle RAC solution.

Many RAC projects often overrun their scheduled implementation timeframe, with significant costs in terms of resources and monetary value. Also because all RAC configurations differ there is never a 100% proof installation guide for the DBA which makes a lot of the installation experimental.

This paper explores ten lessons to keep in mind when deploying a RAC solution and the technology decisions the project must make in regards to Oracle and Vendor hardware and software partnerships.

It covers:
- The differences between RAC and Dataguard.
- The cost of RAC? Or the cost of not deploying RAC?
- Selecting the full Oracle implementation or using 3rd Party technology stacks to manage disk and clustering.
- ASM, Veritas or status quo for disk? And who will support you.
- What Best Practices can help you in a real world implementation.