Loaiza says the most appropriate targets for this technique are the auxiliary databases behind production databases, as well as standby, reporting, testing, and disk-backup databases.
Oracle's IT department has dabbled with this concept, deploying four Apple Computer Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) Xserve arrays for the recovery area of a 4,000-user database. Administrators feared backup performance would suffer, but Loaiza reports little performance hit and $200,000 saved on new storage after five months.
Where does the savings come from? Loaiza claims the price/performance comparison between ATA and Fibre Channel is mostly a wash, or even favors ATA with certain types of sequential throughput. Also, enterprises can buy more arrays with the same amount of money, increasing the size of their storage grids.
"You get high availability using low-cost components because you build a system that can tolerate their failures," Loaiza says.
Besides Apple, Oracle has signed up Dell Inc. (Nasdaq: DELL), EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), Engenio
Information Technologies Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), MPC Computers, and Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP). Now we'd like to see some customers, besides Oracle.
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