The Oracle 11g RAC technology places a lot of responsibility on the network layer within the data center; it requires a high performing public as well as private network to deliver the optimal rate of scalability, performance, and availability. Because the data within an RAC environment must pass across the interconnect network interfaces, you will need to size and tune the network interfaces accordingly or suffer from performance issues within your 11g RAC environments.
The interconnect functions as the network device as part of the private network between cluster nodes in an Oracle 11g RAC configuration. Its purpose is to transfer Oracle data between nodes in the cluster, over a high speed network interface, via the Cache Fusion mechanism for RAC. We will review the network hardware details in this section on how best to select and configure the right components for the private network interconnect...