RE: OFA and Shared Storage

EMC storage is very reliable, no question. However, I have personally seen terrible SAN disasters on many vendors' SANs, but most of them on EMC (since I worked for them). Without going into specifics, the SAN problems I've seen were caused by (in rough order):

1. human error - changing SANs tends to be a heavily manual operations, with a huge margin for error. Plus the portion of the IT population that understands the care and feeding of SANs is negligible.
2. Firmware bugs in hardware - there have been some truly horrific firmware bugs in storage equipment, especially fibre channel switches.
3. Operating system/driver bugs - there's a lot of crummy code out there in general, I suppose

As an aside, this is also almost the identical list that I have for the major reasons I've seen organizations instantiate Disaster Recovery procedures - an actual disaster is almost never the reason.

The moral of the story is, while YMMV, I would always keep copies of truly critical things like redo logs, control files, etc. elsewhere, ideally on something completely disparate. Of course, the more disparate the "something" is, the harder it is to manage and while less prone to hardware error, is more prone to human error. So maybe the moral of the story is that you can't win?

:)

Thanks,
Matt

--
Matthew Zito
GridApp Systems
Email: mzito_at_gridapp.com
Cell: 646-220-3551
Phone: 212-358-8211 x 359
http://www.gridapp.com



> -----Original Message-----

> From: ml-errors_at_fatcity.com [mailto:ml-errors_at_fatcity.com] On 

> Behalf Of Mercadante, Thomas F

> Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2003 8:45 AM

> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

> Subject: RE: OFA and Shared Storage

> 

> 

> except that in the 5 years I have been using EMC SAN, we have 

> *never* experienced an outage.  never had to perform a 

> recovery because of SAN errors. never anything.

> 

> Tom Mercadante

> Oracle Certified Professional

> 

> 

> -----Original Message-----

> Sent: Monday, September 22, 2003 6:05 PM

> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

> 

> 

> > EMC SAN disk has such an incredible uptime, that worrying 

> about losing 

> > things like control files are (almost) a thing of the past.

> 

> Uptime is only one thing, there are several other errors that 

> might occur, like IO controller errors, memory/CPU glitches 

> and file system corruptions like Matthew already said..

> 

> Tanel.

> 

> 

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> Author: Tanel Poder

>   INET: tanel.poder.003_at_mail.ee

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