Potential Data Loss Issue on Exadata

Posted in: Technical Track

I just got an Exadata Customer Advisory e-mail from Oracle, identifying “an important issue that needs your immediate attention” and pointing to MOS note 1265396.1.

Note 1265396.1 talks of an issue with disk controllers in Exadata storage servers declaring false disk failures. In some “rare cases”, multiple such false failures occur at the same some, potentially causing data loss.

The issue applies to Sun (V2) database machines only, not the HP V1 or database machines or with the newer X2-2/X2-8 database servers.

The only fix is to upgrade to the newly-released version 11.2.2.1.1 of the storage server software. A combination of an upgrade and manually forcing disks back online at the disk controller and ASM levels can “bring back” the data in case of loss, assuming the disks haven’t been physically removed of course.

The 11.2.2.1.1 patch will run on any 11.2.0.1+ databases, though either 11.2.0.2 or 11.2.0.1 plus bundle patch 6 is recommended. If the database patches are in place, the storage server patch can be applied in a rolling fashion without downtime.

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About the Author

Marc is a passionate and creative problem solver, drawing on deep understanding of the full enterprise application stack to identify the root cause of problems and to deploy sustainable solutions. Marc has a strong background in performance tuning and high availability, developing many of the tools and processes used to monitor and manage critical production databases at Pythian. He is proud to be the very first DataStax Platinum Certified Administrator for Apache Cassandra.

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