I know there has recently been a flurry of mails regarding Oracle on a filer but is anyone running Informix on one? I ask because there are alot of issues with the whole Informix/Onbar kludge that we are running into in an effort to evaluate this.

Netapp has been involved in the preliminary discussions and will be in the future as well but I wanted to get an idea from real people in the real world as to the problems you solved and others you ran into.

Here's a primer of what we think are the benefits:

1) snapshots - much faster than tape backup, takes minimal disk space 2) snapmirror - easy DR 3) snaprestore - fast recovery from an archive (snapshot) for testing and/or devel 4) snapvault - able to take snapshots every 5 minutes (avoid logical logs altogether) and migrate them to R100, increased retention period due to minimal space requirements 5) system recovery - data resides on filer so cpu becomes a FRU

Here are a couple of issues/questions regarding the above:

Can all Informix data (i.e., database, binaries, etc.) reside on nfs leaving only system files on the cpu (i.e. system, services, vfstab)? Can snapshots every 5 minutes really replace logical logs if 5 minutes is an acceptable point-in-time recovery period? Can snapshots be used to get a reliable backup without quiescing the database? In the event that logical logs are still required we would write them to mirrored internal drives. Has anyone managed to write these logs to nfs?

Thanks.