You can look for other disk layout solutions. Many new lower-cost solutions have come to market recently that some customers have explored, such as Auspex fileservers, Solaris NFS storage devices, Network Appliances storage devices, and Oracle's Raw Iron solution. These solutions typically have a very large write cache or minimal OS overhead, ensuring extremely fast writes and disk failure handling capacity. For large scale captured data storage, these solutions perform extremely well in tandem with Oracle Windows and UNIX systems. In addition to fast read/write access, high availability of disk, they also provide new, very fast techniques for data backup, frequently without requiring downtime. Most of these solutions will directly support an Oracle installation. We recommend that you download white papers from the vendors' Websites for more detailed information on each solution. Note: This area is in transition. It is unclear at this time if any one solution maintains a distinct advantage over any other. | |||||||