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: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cell: 646-220-3551
Phone: 212-358-8211 x 359
http://www.gridapp.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 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.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
> -- 
> Author: Tanel Poder
>   INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 
> Fat City Network Services    -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com
> San Diego, California        -- Mailing list and web hosting services
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message
> to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') 
> and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB 
> ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed 
> from).  You may also send the HELP command for other 
> information (like subscribing).
> -- 
> Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
> -- 
> Author: Mercadante, Thomas F
>   INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 
> Fat City Network Services    -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com
> San Diego, California        -- Mailing list and web hosting services
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message
> to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') 
> and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB 
> ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed 
> from).  You may also send the HELP command for other 
> information (like subscribing).
> 

-- 
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
-- 
Author: Matthew Zito
  INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Fat City Network Services    -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com
San Diego, California        -- Mailing list and web hosting services
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message
to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in
the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L
(or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from).  You may
also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).

Reply via email to