I don't think option 1 is even possible, since you presented your LUNs to your Oracle boxes via FC ..Celerra has no idea about them. Have you explored options in Commvalt where your Oracle box acts as a storage server with tape drives presented to it directly for lan-free backups ?  For example we have one windows box that's running Networker storage node option, we mount Exchange LUNs snapshots on it and spin them to VTL. Metadata still goes over IP to your backup server but the actual data movement occurs over FC network (we have dedicated HBA and VSAN for backup fabric)

Hmm,

Well we were thinking of the following scenario.

1. Add HBA to media server.
2. Put Oracle database into hot backup mode.
3. Clone luns under ASM.
4. Take Oracle database out of hot backup mode.
5. Backup cloned luns presented to media server,

This provides for objectives;

1,3,4 but not 2. I am basically trying to have my cake and eat it. I was hoping that backups of oracle in a SAN environment involving EMC and Commvault would not be trail blazing

neither am I, however my understanding is rman does a disk back as well as the tape backup. Once the tape backup is visible as being complete to RMAN, it can reuse the disk space used, otherwise logically RMAN believes it has to keep the disk backup and has to be given logically more disk space ( this is logical disk space for RMAN rather than actual disk space , we can simply delete the existing backup) So the reason for syncing up the state of the backup with RMAN is to avoid having to have this logical disk space extension to RMAN ).

i am not a Oracle DBA but why do you need RMAN backup if you are putting database in hot backup mode and thus provide transaction consistency ?

You are probably talking about FRA and archive logs.

We use Oracle GeoRAC (one of those rare people in the world I guess).  Smaller system are backed up via RMAN to secondary starorage (tape emulation by VTL, soon to be replaced by DataDomain).  The difference is that our LUNs come from Dell Equalogic (as Oracle will support snapshot consistency with GeoRAC only with that grrrr), but that does not matter really here; you can either attached tape to Oracle box (SAN) or send it across the LAN via RMAN.

ok,

This is an update on this, and I am posting it here because its kind of funny.

So I asked Commvault ( Backup Software Vendor ), to verify that a proposed solution would be supported by them.

They came back and said, you are using a Celerra. We have validated a clarrion. So you are in an unsupported environment.

So at the moment I am attempting to explain that a Celerra FC enabled is basically exposing the clarrion back end to FC use, so essentially the Celerra morphs into both a Celerra and a Clarrion.

Is there anyone in EMC I can talk to to explain to Commvault their product line ?

i would think your TC could help you there.