Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC), is an option to Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition and included with Oracle Database 11g Standard Edition (on clusters with a maximum of 4 sockets). Oracle RAC supports the deployment of a single database across a cluster of servers—providing unbeatable fault tolerance, performance and scalability with no application changes necessary. Analysts are taking note of RAC's growing importance in a wide range of customers across all industries for transaction processing and data warehousing applications.

Benefits

• 24/7 availability—Provide continuous uptime for database applications
• On-demand scalability—Expand capacity by simply adding servers to your cluster
• Lower computing costs—Use low-cost commodity hardware and reduce cost of downtime
• World record performance—Runs faster than the fastest mainframe

Grid computing—Oracle RAC is the foundation for grid computing