Oracle Database Tips by Donald Burleson

Oracle10g Grid Computing with RAC
Chapter 5 - Preparing Shared Storage

What Is Automated Storage Management?

ASM is the logical extension of the power of Oracle-managed files (OMF). In previous releases of OMF, files were created and managed automatically for you, but with ASM, you reap the additional benefits of features such as ASM disk group mirroring and striping. ASM was developed by the same group that developed ODM (Oracle Disk Manager) within Oracle Corporation.

ASM was designed to preserve all existing database functionality. Your existing databases will operate as they always have. Existing databases using file systems or with storage on raw devices will operate as they always have. However, even in existing Oracle 10g Databases, new files can be created as ASM files while old ones are administered in the old way. This means that databases can have a mixture of ASM files, Oracle-Managed files, and manually managed files all at the same time.

Why A.S.M ?

Before we examine the role and position of ASM in the storage stack of the database files, let's look at some of the storage management features that are often used in varying degree of the usage. They include:

• Direct I/O
   

• Asynchronous I/O
   

• Striping
   

• Mirroring
   

• SAME and Load Balancing

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