About Database Validator Operations; Database Validator Components - HP StorageWorks P9000 User Manual

2 About Database Validator operations

Database Validator components

The following figure shows the Database Validator system components and their functions for
Oracle data validation checking. The RAID Manager software is used to specify the logical units
(LUs) to be checked and the type of check to be performed (type depends on the Oracle version).
The files to be checked include data files (including tablespace files), redo log files, and control
files. The files must be stored on raw volumes. If data is written from the host server to the storage
system, the P9500 CHA initiates the data check. If invalid data is detected, the write I/O is rejected,
the CHA reports the error to RAID Manager, and RAID Manager outputs an error to the log (syslog).
Database Validator is provided as a program product (license key) for the P9500.
Figure 2 Database Validator components
The following figure shows a typical database system configuration. As shown in this figure, there
are many components between the Oracle database program and the storage system:
Operating system
I/O driver
Logical Volume Manager (LVM)
Fibre-channel (FC) host bus adapter (HBA)
FC switch (and other network components)
These components may fail intermittently or persistently. When these failures are detected as errors,
the system administrator can take appropriate recovery action. However, it is possible that all
layers might pass the data without detecting the failure. The Oracle software and the P9500 have
very robust data protection capabilities that can prevent data corruption within both the database
management system (DBMS) and the storage system, but until now they could not detect data
corruption that occurred between DBMS and the storage system.
The other data corruption risk is a non-Oracle application overwriting the Oracle data files on the
storage system. The Database Validator function also protects existing Oracle data files from being
overwritten by data from other applications.
6 About Database Validator operations