"until the split is sent to tape, there is no good backup because a disk failure in the primary backup storage can destroy the entire snapshot" Maybe here is again terminology misuse... That statement above is, actually, irrelevant for split-mirror techniques. It's only relevant for snapshot technology. On 11/9/06, Hameed, Amir <Amir.Hameed@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
We have been using EMC's BCV technology to backup our mission critical database for the past fours years and it has been working fine for us. The database size is over 1.2 TB. Once the establish is complete, the split is almost instantaneous and does not take more than a minute. As for the argument that "until the split is sent to tape, there is no good backup because a disk failure in the primary backup storage can destroy the entire snapshot". Even though this is true but there are ways to protect the online backup mirror by mirroring it with 1+0 or 0+1. It is certainly not a cheap solution but there is no guarantee that a tape will not go bad after the snapshot is copied to the tape. We have been operating our snapshot devices in "non-protective" mode all these years and we have had situations where a drive went bad after the snapshot was taken, but we use rotating BCVs where we always have two backups on-line, the most current one and the one taken a night before that and if the devices are configured properly, the chances of both mirrored copies going bad is low. The backups also go to take soon after the snapshot is taken. Amir
-- Best regards, Alex Gorbachev The Pythian Group Sr. Oracle DBA http://www.pythian.com/blogs/author/alex/ http://blog.oracloid.com -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l