> Originally, we tried using our tape backup software > to read the oracle flash recovery area (oracle raw > device on a seperate set of san disks), however our > backup software has a known issue with the the > particular version of ORacle we are using.
So one option is to get the backup vendor to update their software; or to upgrade Oracle? That doesn't sound likely to be practical, though. > However this does not work because all four hosts > need access to the backup indexes which are stored on > the shared disk. As I mentioned earlier this is not > working with ZFS and apparently is fostering > corruption in the ZFS. Yes. It won't work with any non-shared file system. > the original plan was that all 4 servers read/write to > the same set of shared storage. So you need a shared file system (or you need to use Oracle's sharing capabilities, but it sounds like your tape backup software can't deal with that). > Now it seems our only option is to switch to NFS (and > use the network) while the dedicated Fiber laid to > each of these four hosts goes unused or buy QFS for > tens of thousands of dollars Another possibility might be to buy Sanergy (which allows NFS traffic to be re-routed from either QFS or UFS file systems to direct SAN I/O in some cases), but I don't know whether it's supported with Oracle. And it might be more expensive than shared QFS (which is supported with Oracle RAC). > I still wonder if NFS could be used over the FC > network in some way similar to how NFS works over > ethernet/tcp network Possibly. I'm not sure what configurations Sun supports IP-over-FC in. > Let me know if I am overlooking something, the last > hope here is to see if GlusterFS can run reliably on > the Solaris 10 v490's talking to our san. Uh. You'd trust your data to that? It doesn't look very baked. > Maybe IP over Fiberchannel and just treat the FC as > if it was a network Yes, that's a possibility. Seriously, though, if you've got terabytes of data being backed up every night, spending the money on QFS, or dedicated disks, or anything else that would give you backup capabilities, sounds like a Really Good Idea. (There's a reason why backups are a major cost of storage ownership. Sigh.) This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
