RE: IBM FlashCopy

Hi Don,

Are you talking about the FastT from IBM? We have a FastT 600 and do use the FlashCopy utility to do an online snapshot of our DB for backup to tape (actually Tivoli, but it'll hit tape eventually). I don't know about FlashCopy preventing any kind of corruption that you mentioned, but I would think that generally would be moot if all of your permanent tablespaces are in BACKUP MODE when the copy happens. This is provided that you're running in archivelog mode (if you're not you might as well keep all your data in MS Access).

Does this work? Yes! How do I know? After nightly Tivoli backups are completed, we start that FlashCopy up as a new instance. I know, I know, there's major I/O overhead on the SAN for the pre-modified block copies from Production to this new instance throughout the day, but we really don't notice it. We've got about 1.3TB of physical disk to support a 50GB DB and dual 2GB cached FC interconnects to the FastT. It's not an issue for us. I balked at it myself, but it's withstood some very heavy pre-production hammering and the test of 18 months of production use.

HTH! GL! Rich

Rich Jesse                        System/Database Administrator
rich.jesse_at_quadtechworld.com      QuadTech, Sussex, WI USA
 

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Don Morse Sent: Wednesday, December 14, 2005 1:24 PM To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: IBM FlashCopy

Our university is purchasing this product from IBM for backup of our SAN. The tech sales rep tells me it can also be used for Oracle online backups. Has anyone used this product? How can this utility prevent fractured blocks? Even if the disk were quiesced before the mirror was split, how does the FlashCopy utility know it didn't quiesce the disk halfway through an Oracle block update?

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