AIX

Has anyone tried SAN to SAN mirroring on IBM DS SAN Storage.

DS5020 mentions Enhanced Remote Mirror to multi-LUN applications

I wonder if Oracle High availibility can be setup using Remote Mirror option of SAN ?

Well, I am sure most SAN can be configured for mirroring, which is raid-2 or something like that. To achieve the most bang for your buck, you want the mirrors to be as far apart as possible, so something between the application host and short of the storage box needs to know where there are 2 so it can sidestep the dead side as well as splitting the query load and duplicating the churn. The farther upstream it is done, the greater the reliability, but too close can load the app server and communications, unless fiber has multicast write and anycast read. There may be several layers vying to mirror your storage, so pick wisely.

Mirroring got overshadowed a bit by raid, but has always had a query bandwidth advantage, with two devices handling query. Within the devices, there can be as much striping as in raid, so that is no different. When writing, there is no parity calculation and additional write time, just two immediate simultaneous writes. With raid in sequential striping mode, you write data to 1,2,3,4 and parity to 5, then data to 5,1,2,3 and parity to 4, and so on, so while reading is 5x spindle speed, writing is 4x. A mirrored pair trades space for bandwidth. Disk is cheap, and bandwidth is golden. Finally, it seems some raid systems seem to only get defects detected by staff when 2 adjacent devices fail, so often raid5 is either also mirrored or great downtime, data loss and partial restore pain is experienced.