Lazy Log Writer - Vindication & thank you Fitaloon

The final chapter: The database continued plodding along wretchedly until last Friday night at midnight when I got a call, "The production database is down."
I crawled out of bed, bleary eyed, signed in, and tried to start it. I got:

ALTER DATABASE MOUNT
Sat Oct 11 00:35:05 2008
ORA-00202: control file: '/u01/control02.ctl'
ORA-27037: unable to obtain file status

That woke me up. OK, Who/what messed with the control file?
I tried to look at the file and got a message that told me that not only was the control file inaccessable, the entire drive /u01 was inaccessable.

I called across the great divide to the company who controls the hardware and eventually got, "The backup battery for the write cache needs replacing in the SAN".

Monday morning I resent my email to management from a week and a half before. I highlighted my paraphrasing of Fitaloon's comment to my first posting on this subject, "Could our problem be caused by the write cache on the disk having some sort of problem? For example, could it be something as simple as failed backup batteries for the write cache?" Thank you, Fitaloon. You hit the nail on the head.

Since the replacement of the battery, our log writer has been zipping right along, good performance, at last!