We acquired a company and want to move its Oracle databases to our datacenter (midwest to east coast). There are approximately 42 oracle instances to move the largest being about 50GB. The DB we need to move are running on 8.0.4 on Sequent hardware and we want to move it to our data center on HPUX running 8.1.7.

We intend to take an extended weekend outage to complete the move. Due to the differences in operating systems, we are thinking that our only option is to use RMAN and backup to tape, ship the tapes and restore on the 8.1.7/HPUX environment.

Can anyone comment on what the gotchas might be in such a plan and is there a more efficient way to accomplish this?
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