Oracle Parallel Server / Other HA Solutions

I need a little advice. We have a fairly new (< 1 year) 8.1.5 instance to support my company's internet business. We recently changed our network solutions provider and now my management wants to achieve a higher level of redundancy than it currently does with mirrored disks. The solution being proposed by my Sysadmin is an Oracle Parallel Server solution. Some background is in order here - we have always shut our databases down at night for backups. I am not highly skilled in backup and recovery although I tried some of the hot backup techniques from this list and was able to recover successfully to another server. I noticed that the course offered by Oracle in OPS has backup and recovery as well as performance tuning as pre-requisites, which indicates to me that OPS could be extremely challenging. Also, I have read mainly unfavorable comments about OPS from this list, but most of those comments were based on the Oracle 7 implementations (High administrative costs, difficult to implement, etc.).

Have things improved with Oracle 8i ? Is OPS worth pursuing? Or should I convince my management that extra $$ spent in, say, a hot standby database is well worth it? Is there any other solution that would not involve a second set of disks, rather a second database on the same set of disks ??

Thanks in advance,
Mary Ruiz / Atlanta Received on Thu Oct 12 2000 - 08:55:31 CDT