Oracle Database Tips by Donald Burleson

Oracle10g Grid Computing with RAC
Chapter 5 - Preparing Shared Storage

ASM Is the New Best Practice for Storage Management

The use of ASM files provides all the above-mentioned features without any cost and administrative inconvenience. Above-mentioned characteristics are derived from the ASM methodology inherently.

Another important benefit that accrues is the use of ASM for RAC database. ASM can very well avoid the use of Cluster File System, as the ASM resources (disks and files) are sharable among the RAC instances and fits into the shared storage architecture.

Besides the advantages listed above, there are other benefits that include:

• Ease of administration -- ASM removes the need to specify and manage filenames since ASM knows to place specific data files into specific disk groups. In ASM, every new file automatically gets a new unique name, which eliminates the concern about possibly using the same filename in two different databases.
   

• ASM replaces external volume managers and file systems. ASM includes storage reliability features, such as mirroring. The storage reliability policy is applied on a file basis, rather than on a volume basis. Hence, the same disk group can contain a combination of files protected by mirroring, parity, or not protected at all.

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