VERITAS Storage Foundation 4.1 Oracle Administrator's Guide

Planning Considerations Prerelease 8 September 2005, 8:55am
202 VERITAS Storage Foundation for Oracle Administrator’s Guide
Planning Considerations
Before using Database FlashSnap, you must first determine your intended application. You will
then need to make the following decisions:
◆ Which snapshot mode is appropriate: online, offline, or instant?
◆ Will you need one or two hosts?
Selecting the Snapshot Mode
If your purpose is to use the snapshot for backup or to recover the database after logical errors have
occurred, choose the online option. In the event that your production database is offline, choose
offline. If you intend to use the snapshot for decision-support analysis, reporting, development, or
testing, choose instant. An instant snapshot is not suitable for recovery because it is not necessarily
an exact copy of the primary database.
Selecting One or Two Hosts
If maintaining the performance of your primary database is critical, you can offload processing of
the snapshots to a secondary host. For off-host processing, storage must be shared between the
primary and secondary hosts.
If cost savings is most important, you can choose to do the processing on the same host as the
primary database to save on hardware costs.