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HP OpenVMS Systemsask the wizard |
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The Question is: We are setting up the Hot Standby option with Oracle Rdb, but some of our important production data is in RMS files. The production and standby sites are networked and have a 45Mbps (DS3) connection. What are my options for keeping a close to real-time copy of the flat files at our offsite location? We are going to be upgrading VMS soon so if new features will be available for use soon also. The Answer is : Why have a standby site when you can have a distributed cluster and can use the systems and the data from all hosts concurrently? By its very nature, a standby site without this capability is wasteful -- the resources at the standby site are unused in normal production save for the journaling- and BACKUP-related operations. Most customers would clearly prefer to get some benefit and some use from all available servers and these resources, prefering to see some degraded operations during failures. (Further, regular use of these remote "spare" systems ensures that the remote site is actually operational, something you clearly don't want to have to determine during an actual fail-over.) With a distributed multi-site cluster, you can have local shadowset volumes containing the actual files on the volumes, given the clustering capabilities that are possible with a DS3-class (or faster) link. If you wish to maintain journaled and recoverable copies of your RMS files, the RMS journaling capabilities are available as well. Disaster-Tolerant Cluster Services consulting and support is available from HP. In general, establishing a reliable and functional disaster-tolerant configuration (or even a fail-over configuration) is far more difficult than it might initially look, with many and particularly many subtle considerations involved.
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