Dolphin Express with SuperSockets provides a scalable high performance interconnect solution for a horizontal Scale-Out approach for enterprises using Oracle 10g and Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC). This paper discusses the advantages of using SuperSockets with Dolphin Express to build scalable, high performance and highly cost-effective Oracle RAC clusters with industry standard servers and Dolphin components.

Large database systems have traditionally been run on high-cost mainframe systems. With modern hardware and software components built on standard high volume technologies, commodity servers can be interconnected to form clusters and grids that provide huge cost savings compared with mainframe systems. Coupled with a high performance, low latency interconnect, clusters and grids can provide similar performance levels to that of mainframes at a fraction of the cost. The features of Oracle RAC coupled with the fault-tolerant features built into the Dolphin Express hardware and the SuperSockets software provide highly available shared database solutions on clusters built from industry standard servers.

The benchmark results in this paper show up to a quadrupling of performance when using Dolphin Express compared to gigabit Ethernet, both with regards to the number of transactions per second and the response time experienced by the user.