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RobertFlag for United States of America

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Tandem Servers WIth Oracle Database

I have a client who is in need of a backup peer server.  The current server is running Windows 7 and a Oracle Database.  Their current server has been offline for over a week, three times last year.  The client in question can't have this happen continuously.  Both machines would need to be running the oracle database.  My question is what kind of options can I offer my client as a backup server.  He has already turned down a fail-over Server 2012 setup.  Is their any option that I can offer him that wont run into the tens of thousands of dollars?
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Sean Stuber

what kind of fail over time is acceptable?

could you simply do a point-in-time recovery from backups and archived logs to a new server?

This goes along with the "roll your own" mentioned above; but if your backups are frequent and available to the new server, then you can reduce the amount logs needed to be come consistent and up to date.
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My clients original statement was that he wanted a real time fail over.  Since the quote was out of reach for him, he is exploring other options.  He would like his fail over time to be close to 0 if he can.  However, I feel a 24 hour turn around would be acceptable compared to his current 1 week turn time.
Just remember:
Inexpensive sort of implies some data loss.

It is all about what they can live with.

>>Their current server has been offline for over a week, three times last year.

What is causing the outages?

Must be serious to not be able to manually copy files around and get back up in under a week.

It might be possible to separate the database from the server on a NAS/SAN.  Server one fails, server two can be started up to take over.
what's the size of the database?
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The outage is caused in a weird way.  If anything touches the database files (antivirus scans the folder) the database gets corrupted and then Oracle falls on its face requiring the machine to be reloaded with a fresh copy of Windows.  We may explore the NAS idea as a possible solution.

The size of the database is roughly 4 or 5gb.
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4 or 5gb is tiny, if you take hourly hot backups and copy them to the new server every hour and then copy your archived logs immediately you should be able to do a point in time recovery within minutes.

if your backup is written to some kind of networked storage, then copying may not even be necessary, simply mounting the storage from the new server may be sufficient for immediate access.
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>>antivirus scans the folder

NEVER LET ANTI-VIRUS SCAN ORACLE DATA FILES!!!

Never seen it corrupt files but it will KILL overall system performance.

It also really serves no purpose.

>>the database gets corrupted and then Oracle falls on its face requiring the machine to be reloaded with a fresh copy of Windows

NEVER seen a trashed Oracle database require a full OS install.

Been running Oracle on Windows for about 16 years.  Never had it happen.

I agree with Alex:  Your system has demons...  I would contact a Priest!  ;)

All that said:
What is the Oracle version (please include all 4 numbers)?

There may be a bug if the version isn't fully supported on Win 7.