Oracle Automatic Storage Management

This book is intended for technical managers, DBAs, system administrators, and storage architects who want to understand ASM concepts or who will be implementing ASM. We have designed this book to provide the reader with the essentials of ASM and the best practices for implementation. This design includes a chapter-by-chapter process flow for enabling, configuring, and managing ASM in any environment, as well as ensuring that the databases (relational database management system [RDBMS] instances) are configured correctly to leverage ASM. For those eager to delve “under the hood” of ASM, this book also defines critical ASM internal operations and structures. The last chapter, “From Discussion to Deployment,” covers a very important aspect of getting ASM into the user infrastructure and navigating all the organization boundaries affected by introducing this new technology.

ASM is a management tool designed specifically to simplify database storage management by building filesystem and volume manager capabilities into the Oracle database kernel. This design simplifies storage management tasks, such as creating and laying out databases and disk space management. ASM also offers a simple, consistent storage management interface across all server and storage platforms. Additionally, ASM provides the performance of raw input/output (I/O) with the easy management of a filesystem. In addition to the aforementioned benefits for single-instance databases, ASM provides a clustered filesystem for Real Application Cluster (RAC) databases and a consistent clusterwide namespace for database files. ASM diskgroups provide much simpler management than shared raw devices while providing the same performance. ASM diskgroups can also store archive logs, Recovery Manager (RMAN) backup sets, and other recovery area files that cannot be stored in raw devices. Because ASM enables the user to manage disks using familiar create, alter, and drop SQL statements, DBAs do not need to learn a new skill set or make crucial decisions on provisioning. An Enterprise Manager (EM) interface and a command-line utility are also available for those ASM administrators who are not familiar with SQL.

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