Firewire allows developers to easily and cheaply build a clustered system on a shared disk, which is useful for testing clustered applications and checking out the advanced features of Oracle's Real Application Clusters technology. The Firewire cards needed to build a cluster can cost as little as 10% as much as the required FiberChannel hardware.

This is some software needed to run Oracle RAC using a shared firewire disk. Right now, there are addon modules for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, and replacement kernels for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. Other recent Linux distributions have recent enough firewire code, so you don't need any special software. Just make sure you have the following in your /etc/modprobe.conf file: options sbp2 exclusive_login=0