Re: SAN's, snapshots and online backups questions...

On Fri, 18 Jul 2003 21:19:54 +0000 (UTC), Daniel Nichols wrote:

>It would be interesting to find out if people who have implemented
>SAN/NAS really think they are worth it.

We're using a SAN with a SAP database, a Siebel database, a datawarehouse and some other databases.

It's great :
- better utilisation of the disk space. What a server don't need, an another one can take it. If a server need extra space for a manipulation, no problem.

• for availability : if a server is out, we can move the database very quickly to an another server
• for backup. We use snapshot with an online backup (the tablespace are in backup mode only during 1 minute) and offline backup for another database and then, the backup is done from an another server : impact on the performance of the production server very low. So we can do the backup early in the evening. As the backup is still available on the "mirror" during all the next day, the recovery can be done very fast (a few minutes) although the database has 200 GB of datafiles.
• for cloning : With the snapshot feature, we will be able (not done yet) to clone a database during business hours very quickly.
• Backup (and restore) can be done with the SAN (lan free backup) very quickly.

SAN can be expensive but the gain is real. Better availability can be reached.

For the backup scripts, I've just developped a script for umounting filesystems from the backup server, mounting filesystems onthe backup server, and launch the copy. The Oracle backup scripts were almost unchanged.

My 2 cents, Received on Fri Jul 18 2003 - 17:15:18 CDT