Creating highly available Oracle databases with immediate failover is expensive, though sometimes justifiable. However, organizations whose SLA includes near-minute failover can consider a Veritas Clustered File System (CFS) solution. CFS is an option within Storage Foundation (SF); SF users need a simple license key to turn it on. Application clustering to ensure high availability of databases without Cluster File System results in failover times that become increasingly longer as more disks, volumes, and file systems are added into the configuration. Furthermore, if a file system corruption occurrs, the failover time will be dramatically impacted while the file system recovers.
Cluster File System enables the Veritas Oracle Disk Manager (ODM) interface, providing near raw disk performance with all the benefits of a file system. This not only improves the speed of your data base when running on a file system, it improves failover times by reducing the time it takes for Oracle to restart in the event of failure.
