ASM on Linux with SAN : yes or no ?

Hello,

I'm currently preparing the migration of 2 Oracle 8i and 9i databases currently running on LPAR's with AIX 5.2 (IBM PowerPC) to Oracle 10g R2 on RHEL AS/ES 4.0 with Intel or AMD hardware. We are moving away from AIX and towards Linux and cheaper hardware to reduce hardware and maintenance costs and because one of our software vendors doesn't support AIX anymore. Now my question is, since the new server(s) will be connected to a SAN (probably IBM or EMC), is it still useful to use ASM as storage for the database files ? The sysadmin guys are against using a Linux LVM, since they think it is not mature enough. So the only other option would be to use "standard" Linux ext3 filesystems for the database files. Is anyone using ASM on Linux production systems ? Any pro/contras ? What about the combination ASM/SAN (double striping) ? ASM overhead versus filesystem buffer cache overhead ? What would be the recommended database block size when using ASM on Linux ?

Thanks,
Matthias Received on Wed Aug 23 2006 - 15:44:42 CDT