Recovering Exadata

Abstract

You may have heard the saying “disk drives spin, and then they die.” It’ not something we like to think about, but from the moment you power up a new system, your disk drives begin aging. Disk drives have come a long way in the past 30 years, and typical life expectancy has improved dramatically. At the end of the day, though, it’s a matter of “when” a disk will fail, not “if.” And we all know that many disk drives fail long before they should. Knowing how to diagnose disk failures and what to do when they occur has generally been the responsibility of the system administrator or storage administrator. For many DBAs, Exadata is going to change that. Many Exadata systems out there are being managed entirely by the DBA staff. Whether or not this is the case in your data center, the procedure for recovering from a disk failure on Exadata is going to be a little different than you are used to.