RMAN performance on CoolThreads Servers

Hi All

Happy New Year

I am looking after a Cool Threads Sun Server that is running 10G standard edition.
Oracle 10.2.0.3 with Solaris 10
>From the point of view of database serving it seems to perform
reasonably well, Oracle DB being highly threaded, I would have expected that.

A thing I have found with these servers seems to be that a lot of tasks peripheral to the database serving such as backups and file compression is not very quick and this appears to be due to to the very nature of the cool threads servers, namely that the individual cores in these are relatively slow, in this case 300MHz.

Being that RMAN cannot run parallel processes (Standard Edition) so a backup cant run across say 4 threads, this leaves us to only use scripted backups of the old style. Our Backup is currently running a hot backup script that copies the database and archivelogs to a remote server from where it goes to tape

I would like to recommend the site upgrade to Enterprise to get parallel back capabilities in RMAN, but I doubt that they will take that idea on board.

Have others found these sorts of issues with the cool threads server family, or is there something wrong with the set up of this particular system, or does someone have a suggestion to make thing run faster, parallel execution of things comes to mind, but that is limited under shell scripts.
Can I run multiple instances of rman simultaneously? I can see a lot of reasons why that may potentially come unstuck.

Cheers

-- 
Peter McLarty <peter.mclarty_at_pacificdbms.com.au>
Pacific DBMS Pty Ltd


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