While trying to look at dataguard as a reporting environment i found a very neat and fundamentally cost saving feature added on to dataguard in Oracle 11.
According to the Docs
"As of Oracle Database 11g, Data Guard provides increased flexibility for Data Guard configurations in which the primary and standby systems may have different CPU architectures, operating systems (for example, Windows & Linux), operating system binaries (32-bit/64-bit), and Oracle database binaries (32-bit/64-bit).
This is very interesting and actually provide a lot of cost savings to companies that have systems using Windows based servers and can purchase cheaper linux boxes and make that available . The problem is based on the matrix in note 413484.1 pretty much only Windows and Linux can live in a mixed environment . AIX and Solaris can only live with the same architecture.
