RAC - Interconnect traffic

Question

In the client place the architecture team wants to implement a a node RAC cluster on Sun Solaris on Oracle 10g. But in order to minimize the interconnect traffic they want applications to connect only to one node and the other node will provide fail over capability.
Though this can be achieved with less complexity thru physical standby, theoretically if in a 2 node RAC cluster if we just use one node will it eliminate interconnect traffic?
I guess that there will not be any requests from the second node for blocks held by the first node so no transfer of blocks over interconnect will take place. But still the second node has to know about the blocks held by the first node in order to recover in case the first node crashes(cache fusion?). Right?
TIA
RadKrish

Answer 1

just my 0.02 cents on this .. Why would you want to invest in a High Availability Solution ( RAC ) and attempt to achieve Disaster Recovery ( Failover ) through it ..
Why would you want to minimize the Interconnect traffic in the first place .. A decent Switch plus Gigabit Ethernet / Cat5 cables is all you need for the Interconnect and its known to work well with most types of RAC Setup's ..
With Dynamic Resource Remastering , mastership of blocks across the active nodes get distributed based on access patterns .. so with your kind of setup , almost all the blocks would be mastered on Node:1 after a period of sustained activity .. Further Instance recovery happens using information from the Redo Log Thread of the crashed Node so it should not affect Interconnect traffic ..
Vishwa