Sounds good in theory, but will it work?

We have Oracle 8.1.7 running on an IBM p615 single processor server. I'm an AIX admin, not an Oracle admin. We don't have an Oracle admin on staff.

I need to ensure some level of recovery (somewhat quickly) in case of a total disaster; building burns down, tornado hits,... whatever. I'm not looking for anything fancy and costly like clusters or (a)synchronous replication. What I do have is a full hot backup every night with RMAN and an offsite DR facility.

Here are my thoughts...
Buy a second AIX server (I have a quote for a p520 dual proc) for our DR site. Backup the rootvg (mksysb). On the weekends shut down the Oracle database and do a savevg on the data vg's. Bring Oracle backup and continue to do full RMAN backups durring the week.

Build the new server at the DR sight with the mksysb. If a disaster happens, then I could take the savevg(s) to the DR facility and restore those vgs. This should give me a fully functional Oracle server as of the weekend backup. Then I could use the RMAN backups to restore to the weekly full backup. With this process we could potentionally loose a full days work, but we are comfortable with this risk.

Has anyone done anything like this? Think it will work? What are your thoughts? Received on Wed Nov 08 2006 - 16:53:59 CST