Backups versus snapshots
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 10:51:54 -0500
Message-ID: <8858f3f4bfaec6861a05f6a21963be0e.squirrel_at_lady.zephyrus.com>
The company I work for provides database support for a company that is moving to a converged infrastructure (VCE VBlock). There are discussions about basically not backing up the databases.
The idea is that they will take snapshots of the production databases and then keep archive logs for the retention period (maybe 3 days and maybe as much as 10 days). The snapshots + archive logs will be used to create dev/test environments which should work fine.
If something catastrophic happens with the SAN then there will be no backups. In that event they will failover to the Data Guard standby which would likely involve some level of data loss since we are running in maximum performance mode.
As an old school DBA, this makes me uncomfortable, especially with things I've seen over the years including corrupt snapshots and SAN corruption. It doesn't happen often but seem to see it about every 3 - 4 years for various reasons including human error and firmware bugs.
Thoughts?
Keith Moore
-- http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-lReceived on Thu Sep 18 2014 - 17:51:54 CEST