On 09/30/2011 08:25 AM, Richard Rhodes wrote:

Oracle/RMAN is capable of writing straight to disk by itself.  If we
were to directly NFS mount the DD to the Oracle servers and have RMAN
back them up directly to the DD, we could bypass TSM completely.
No more lanfree/tdpo licensing, setup, rmt devices.  It would really
simplify the environment.  But, it would require much new work.  We've
discussed putting a 10g ethernet card in each AIX chassis and sharing
it among the lpars.

In other words, this option would be a lot of work and cost, but
could be a huge gain in simplifying the environment and eliminating
TSM licensing costs.

And 'flash recovery area'.

Warning:   I'm no oracle clue;  I'm repeating talking points and terms
of art my oracle folks used.  Good information was theirs, transmission
errors mine...

Oracle has a bunch of high-tech whiz-bang recovery and analysis tools
which I lump under the label 'Flash Recovery Area'.   As I understand
it, it goes like this:    "If we've got an extra copy of the database
lying around, we can take that, plus the logs, and do a bunch of useful
introspection on them, without affecting production work flow.  Oh, and
we can calculate a restore _really_ fast."

This is a feature that (so I'm told) Oracle types lust after on a
regular basis, but frequently can't have, because "Gee, that's a lot of
disk to buy just for your fancy analytics toolset".

But if you put it on the DD, then it dedupes to a ludicrously high
degree with your production backups.   Hey presto, new features for your
oracle infrastructure.

You can't do this if your production backups are on tape volumes.


- Allen S. Rout