I'm in the process of architecting a DR project for mirroring our production Oracle database and would love to hear from those who have done so already.
We have been SnapMirroring the daily changes from one of our cluster F940 filer to the other for backup. In looking through the SnapMirror log I see that we are snapmirroring about 23GB of data on average. This is on a database of about 200GB total. We were thinking about using the max of the daily snapmirror number to size the pipe we need to the DR site. That is figuring to be a fair size pipe.
Now our DBA is telling me that using Oracle's archive log they could just ship the logs to the remote site and play it back and achieve pretty much the same result. And the archive logs are averaging only about 4.5GB. That is 1/5 the size. It is fairly significant when you are shipping it half-way across the country! (We are in Foothill Ranch, CA and our DR site is in St. Louis). If that is true then management will probably choose to go with log shipping as opposed to SnapMirroring the data.
I'm going through the data that we are SnapMirroring to figure out if there is something wrong with our setup. I think we are actually SnapMirroring the archive logs as well. Has anyone else been down this path? Any other ideas or suggestions? We are thinking that the log shipping method is going to involve alot more manual work and would like to avoid it if possible but we need to have good justification for that as well.
Derek