Automatic storage management (ASM)

Oracle has Automatic Storage Management, in which you can manage your database storage.

We recommend managing your database storage in Oracle's Automatic Storage Management. Some of the benefits of using ASM include:

• Improved I/O performance and scalability
• Simpler database administration tasks
• Automatic I/O tuning
• Reduction in number of objects to manage

We strongly encourage you to read the many ASM white papers and documents on Oracle's Web site. In addition, most storage vendors have written best practice papers on how to configure ASM for their storage products.

The following are specific ASM recommendations that we have found to be critical for performance:

• For high volume processing environments, ensure ASM is configured with "disk" devices from high-performance disk storage arrays. Some characteristics that you should look for include large NVRAM caches to buffer disk reads and writes, efficient RAID implementation, etc.
• Configure ASM with "External Redundancy" so that redundancy is provided by your storage array instead of being implemented by Oracle. This setting will eliminate the extra overhead in Oracle to maintain redundancy.