Hi team. We have an Oracle instance, which I think is using ASM on SAN LUNs. The SAN is multi-path, multi-fabric with the LUNs are provisioned from a high quality H/A storage array. At the moment the DBAs use RMAN to push backups via MML directly up to a third party backup application. The backup platform we have is not H/A, and is essentially a tier 4 storage application, and so we don't want our Oracle instance to be utterly reliant upon the availability of the backup platform. We want to provide the DBAs with a lot more SAN disk space from different storage pools, three or four times what they have already, so that they can backup to SAN storage and effectively keep multiple warm copies - and then we want the DBAs to also push these local-ish backups directly up to the backup application.
Is it possible for Oracle RMAN to do this, i.e: Oracle -> RMAN -> disk (three day retention) -> RMAN -> tape (several weeks/months retention), and for Oracle to still know about all of the backups, i.e. the three local copies and also all of the several more copies effectively copied up on the MML platform.
We're being told by the DBAs that they don't want to do this because at the moment they can see all of their backups in the backup platform, and they say that if they RMAN to disk for a three/four day retention then they loose visibility of the older backups - i.e. they seem to think that the second stage of the backup process will have to be a file-system type backup which takes a backup of the RMAN files on disk. Of course we don't want our DBAs to loose visibility of their older backups from within Oracle itself. So, we're wondering if we can use RMAN in two stages?
Thanks in advance. Dave.