Re: 10g ASM is junk ...

"Niall Litchfield" <niall.litchfield_at_dial.pipex.com> wrote in message news:<40b3973a$0$20508$cc9e4d1f_at_news-text.dial.pipex.com>...
> "Domenic" <domenicg_at_hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:c7e08a19.0405241711.3c55f744_at_posting.google.com...
> > I've been looking over ASM in 10g. Am I the only one who thinks ASM
> > is a piece of junk? It looks like software-based RAID, and you need
> > to take on the overhead of an ASM instance. How can this possibly be
> > faster or better than striping/mirroring at the operating system
> > level?
>
> I don't see it as junk, and I don't see it as software RAID - I see it as a
> software SAN (or possibly a cheap SAN). I'd rather have a hardware SAN and
> none of this auto balancing malarkey (I believe that is the technical term
> :( ) .
>
> lets see what it looks like in 10g release 3 or 11x release 2.

Apple Computer has just come out with a software SAN. I think it is called xSAN. There may be some advantages of software over hardware in this case. Quite a few sites have had problems properly configuring their hardware SANs. A software version can take user errors out of the equation.

I think it may be too early to judge the merits of ASM. The question right now may be just how good a job has Oracle done on the logic/code? For sites with no real Oracle DBA or DBA's forced to work with several databases at once without the benefit of in-depth knowledge it may be the best disk solution.

IMHO -- Mark D Powell -- Received on Tue May 25 2004 - 20:31:39 CDT