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