Re: ASM of any significant value when switching to Direct NFS / NetApp / non-RAC?

From: Matthew Zito <matt_at_crackpotideas.com>
Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2012 12:48:57 -0400
Message-ID: <CAJ7936xyv1eca1ZhP4vOCcpw6U2gb3YYvj0OwZEFxT9OkJbsrQ_at_mail.gmail.com>



Yes, that, plus the built-in volume management, plus the simplicity, plus some of the advanced features, are the benefits of ASM. Most of those benefits go away when you're using NAS, so I typically don't encourage people to use ASM over NAS, unless you have to (i.e. Standard Edition).

Otherwise, ASM just adds a black box on top of regular filesystem access - you're locked into Oracle tools for backup and recovery, you probably can't use any of the storage vendor provided capabilities without all kinds of gyrations, and you generally lose all the advantages of the NAS platform.

ASM makes sense as a means of getting around the dumb limitations a lot of enterprise storage arrays have, and as a marketing mechanism by Oracle to convince customers to buy dumber, cheaper storage arrays, leaving more money to spare for licensing. When you have a "smart" storage array, like a NAS device, why add complexity?

Matt

On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 12:37 PM, Andrew Kerber <andrew.kerber_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> For me, the really valuable pieces of ASM are the ability to add and remove
> devices without taking downtimes and without having to worry about moving
> files around. If you have a high quality storage system that does that all
> behind the scenes already, I can see where it might not be an advantage.
> Most places I work with dont have that ability.
> On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 11:29 AM, Wayne Smith <wts_at_maine.edu> wrote:
>

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Received on Wed Aug 08 2012 - 11:48:57 CDT

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