• Good article.

    IMO Microsoft has "one upped" Oracle with Always On over Oracle's RAC solution.

    I am a multi-platform DBA. I administer both SQL Server with Always On, and Oracle RAC. SQL with AO is a far less complex, less expensive, and a more resilient solution than Oracle RAC. RAC does not deal at all with the storage being a SPOF. It is shared between all nodes of the cluster simultaneously. On numerous occasions I have experienced momentary hiccups of the storage server, and that always causes the entire cluster go down. So much for being high available.

    With SQL + AO I have never experienced that because unlike RAC it is shared-nothing. IMO RAC is a scalability solution even though Oracle touts it as the ultimate high availability solution. It is not. SQL + AO is both scalable and highly available.