Hi,
I have an application on a SAN partition presented to one server only. If I share this SAN partition with a second server as well, will that cause data corruption (the partition is formatted using ufs) ?
No. However, the second system will not be able to access the data created by the first system unless you setup a clustered environment between the two servers (not as hard as it sounds) or create an NFS mount and share the SAN space via NFS (much easier but there is a single point of failure of the host system crashes).
HTH
Actually, it can cause data corruption. It's not likely, though, and I think if you mount the file system read-only it's safe. But as bluescreen noted, the second system won't see changes made to the file system because of caching.
Unless you need direct access to the SAN LUN for performance reasons, NFS should work fine. Yes, you will have a single point of failure in your system, but you have that already anyway.
Actually the point of concern in NFS is a single point of failure. The servers are also running oracle, RAC. Currently both servers have their own /application (not shared).
Your original post wasn't accurate then:
That makes a huge difference.
Sorry, let me make it clear.
First there are two servers (lets say db1 and db2) which have the oracle database in RAC. Now there are two servers which are going to host the application (lets say app1 and app2). Now they want /app to be a LUN from SAN which is shared between app1 and app2.
In the current setup each app servers has its own /app?
I think i might have to use QFS.