On Thu, Apr 27, 2006 at 09:41:21AM -0400, Ketema Harris wrote:
No, backups are completely unrelated to your storage type; you need them
either way.
Please another post. I meant the storage would do the back ups.
Which isn't a backup. Even expensive storage arrays can break or burn
down.
redundancy, expandability
What I mean by these stupid flavor words is:
Redundancy : raid 5.
You can get that without external storage.
Expandability : the ability to stick another drive in my array and get more
storage and not have to turn of the db.
You can also get that without external storage assuming you choose a
platform with a volume manager.
Do you
need the ability to do snapshots?
Yes.
If that's a hard requirement you'll have to eat the cost & performance
problems of an external solution or choose a platform that will let you
do that with direct-attach storage. (Something with a volume manager.)
Do you want to share one big, expensive, reliable unit between
multiple systems? Will you be doing failover?
Yes, and Yes. Really on one other system, a phone system, but it is the
crux of my business and will be writing a lot of recorded phone calls. I am
working with a storage company now to set up the failover, I want the db and
phone systems to never no if the storage switched over.
If you actually have a couple of systems you're trying to fail over, a
FC SAN may be a reasonable solution. Depending on your reliability
requirement you can have multiple interfaces & FC switches to get
redundant paths and a much higher level of storage reliability than you
could get with direct attach storage. OTOH, if the DB server itself
breaks you're still out of luck. :) You might compare that sort of
solution with a solution that has redundant servers and implements the
failover in software instead of hardware.
Mike Stone
