OMF vs ASM for SAME

Background:
We are installing Oracle 10g database on a brand new Sun V480, Solaris 10 platform. We will be evaluating the Oracle-recommended S.A.M.E. (Stripe And Mirror Everything) strategy. We will be using a Sun StorEdge 3310 hardware RAID with 12 72G drives configured as RAID 1+0 (stripe across 6 mirrored pairs). We plan to partition it with slice 0 occupying all cylinders, except cylinder #1. Thus, the RAID appears to the O/S as 432G at c2t0d0s0.

Also, I am a novice Oracle DBA, having just returned from 10g Admin I class, but having some experience with DBMS (Informix).

For the sake of this thread, please let's not discuss the disk strategy.

Given the above configuration, I do not see an advantage to using ASM (which I gather is new in 10g). It seems to me that OMF would provide the same advantages, less any overhead that ASM may have (because it essentially adds to OMF an intelligent LVM). If I were to use ASM, it would be a implementing group consisting of only a single disk, and ASM wouldn't be able to do anything more than plain OMF anyway, right? I mean no "value add", so to apeak, over just OMF.

So, I am planning on using OMF and skipping ASM.

Does this make any sense to experienced Oracle folks, or am I missing things big time?

Thank you for any comments.

Regards,

DG Received on Wed Jul 06 2005 - 19:12:55 CDT