Good afternoon;
   I'm curious about using a disk Storage Unit for staging cold backups of an 
Oracle database. Is it that much faster than going right to tape in practice? 
Is the setup very complex? Can I fake this without buying Vault or the Oracle 
Agent? Or should I just suck it up and buy one or the other of these?
   I've been re-reading Mark Donaldson's script from 9/15/03, and frankly, it's 
making me a little woozy.
   Right now, we do cold backups of our Oracle databases, for simplicity's 
sake. I'm getting pressure to shrink the backup window, and staging my backups 
to disk seems like a quick way to do so, with the side benefit of speeding up 
restores (until I expire the images from the disks). Will I really buy much 
time? And do I need the Vault software?
   Also, does NBU handle both backups (to disk, and then to tape) on a 
schedule, or do I need to schedule one of these via cron?
   We run NBU 3.4 Data Center right now, on all Sun equipment (clients at 2.6 & 
8, three Media Servers, two L9s and a one-drive L25). If I want to add anything 
-- like the Oracle agent -- I'm afraid that I'll get backed into upgrading my 
whole setup. Which would be fun in theory, but a burden in practice. :7)
   Thanks in advance for any pointers.
-wde
--
Will Enestvedt
UNIX System Administrator
Johnson & Wales University -- Providence, RI