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Giuliano_Rodrig's avatar
Giuliano_Rodrig
Level 2
11 years ago

Licensing for point in time copy on Oracle RAC

In my organization we have Oracle RAC running on RedHat Enterprise Linux and need to create a policy of data protection with continuous data protection.   It is possible to do using only the Stor...
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  • Clifford_Barcli's avatar
    Clifford_Barcli
    11 years ago

    Question first.  You mention the phrase "continuous protection".  Do you mean snapshots, or, do you mean something else like the various continous protection products out there which track changes at the block level to create, for all intensive purposes, continous snapshots.

     

    If you need to snapshot Oracle RAC, then, your need SF for Oracle RAC.

     

    Regarding the three products you mention, appreviated SF Enterprise, SF for Oracle RAC, and SF HA.

     

    SF Enterpirse provides for storage virtualization including snapshots along with specfic enhancements for Oracle i.e. Oracle Smart Tier (storage tiering at the Oracle object level).

     

    SF HA Enterprise add clustering (VCS).  Perfrect for making single instance Oracle highly available. 

     

    SF for Oracle RAC adds specific code to interact correctly with Oracle RAC inlcuding Cluster File System.

     

    Onc can add Veritas Replicator (VR) to any of the above to provide for replication.

    One can add "DR" to SFHA ie SF HA/DR  or SF HA/DR for Oracle RAC to add wide-area failover capabilities.

     

    Hope this helps.

Clifford_Barcli's avatar
Clifford_Barcli
Level 3
11 years ago

Hi Guiliano.

 

Per your definition, neither SF nor VR meet those requirements.  SF and VVR can provide for snapshots and replication copies that are gauruanteed to be crash consistant.  One can use space-optimized snapshots using Storage Foudation to create point-in-time copies.   I have seen customers snapshot several times an hour and save a few days worth of snapshot and only needing a small amount of extra storage to accomindate the snapshots.  The extra storage needed depends on the data change rate.

At this time, Symantec does not provide any product that meets the CDP definition. 

 

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That being said, please take the following into account.    These are just my opionions when dealing with such products before I came to Symantec:

If you do implemet any 3rd party CDP solution, one must do so very carefully.   All Oracle data files along with redo and archieve logs must be protected together as a group to maintain database consistancy.   It is very easy to corrupt a database using CDP tools.  The other consideration is all other data feeds (the rest of the application Oracle is supporting)that the database is supporting.  How will you keep those synchonized?   This is usually done with some type of transaction broker, but is not as easy as you would think to implement correctly.  In general, CDP solutions also consumes quite a bit of storage.  Normmaly twice plus change rate.

Another way to solve the problem is to use log shipping, and delay the applicaiton of the logs to the standby dadtabase by some delta. 

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Hope this helps.