D1000, Veritas, and Oracle Parallel Server questions

I'm a DBA and the company I recently started working at is using 2 Sun e220 servers hooked up to a D1000 unit running Veritas volume manager (also running Oracle 8.1.6 and Solaris 7). Right now Veritas monitors the database on server #1 and if it goes down, it brings up the DB on server #2.. These sun boxes share the drives in the D1000 where the oracle datafiles are installed.

Down the road, we're expecting a huge increase in the amount of data being processed and stored in Oracle (24x7), and I suspect we'll need to move to a parallel server environment (OPS).

Being a newbie to OPS, I believe I read somewhere that OPS requires raw devices. Does this mean we will not be using Veritas volume manager if we switch to OPS, or can Veritas handle this? And will the D1000 drives work in an OPS environment?

Also, I'm a little concerned that the D1000 (which can hold 10 drives) only has 1 drive controller. Is this a cause of concern with possible I/O contention or is this controller effective when reading/writing to 10 disks at once?

Another D1000 question - right now we only have 6 drives in it, resulting in 3 mirrored pairs in a RAID 5 environment. Are the raid mirrored drives that big of an advantage in Oracle, or would I be better off with 6 individual volumes? Since our current D1000 has room for 4 more disks, I've requested that they be added as non mirrored drives which would give me 7 volumes to play with (3 mirrored, 4 non). Again, does this sound feasable with a D1000 that has only 1 disk controller?

Finally, if/when we switch to OPS, I can't imagine why we would need Veritas to monitor the status of our database, since if one goes down the other parallel servers take over (right?). And if we are forced to switch to unix raw devices.. then is our $20,000 Veritas license useless?

Any advice much appreciated..thx..

Allen Received on Fri Feb 16 2001 - 15:06:09 CST