ASM - Introduction

ASM - Automatic storage management

Introduce with Oracle 10gr1.

About ASM

http://www.oracle.com/database/demos/asm.html

Benefits of Automatic Storage Management

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B14117_01/server.101/b10743/mgmt_db.htm#sthref2270

ASM provides many of the same benefits as storage technologies such as RAID or logical volume managers (LVMs). Like these technologies, ASM enables you to create a single disk group from a collection of individual disk devices. It balances I/O to the disk group across all of the devices in the disk group. It also implements striping and mirroring to improve I/O performance and data reliability.
However, unlike RAID or LVMs, ASM implements striping and mirroring at the file level. This implementation enables you to specify different storage attributes for individual files in the same disk group.

Next Part >>>Preparing Disks for ASM instance

http://dbataj.blogspot.com/2008/04/preparing-disk-for-asm-instance.html