Cloud Oracle Storage: how to make ASM even better, the NAS way.

Posted by David Yahalom under ASM, RAC, Oracle

No one can argue about the merits of Oracle ASM. Having a transparent, easy to use and high performance LVM built using the same fundamentals of the Oracle database is a great technology for Oracle DBAs. ASM is a relatively new technology that have gained popularity fast. I’m using ASM on a daily basis and I’m sure many of  you do as well. But it could be even better.

Imagine how wonderful it would be if Oracle took ASM even furthur and made ASM an enterprise-wide network-based unified database storage solution, allowing many remote Oracle DB Instances access a unified “cloud like” storage layer via the network.

Currently using ASM, we need to start an ASM instance for every physical server running an Oracle DB instance. Why not have ASM act as a network-based LVM as well? Let us be able to start an ASM instance on one server having all other Oracle databases, even those running on remote  machines, access that ASM instance over the network.

That would be like exposing our storage as a NAS solution - no matter the vendor.

The benefits this technology would have over regular NAS (Network Attached Storage - such as using NFS mounts for storing Oracle Data Files)  would be having a unified storage deployment strategy for our organization and potentially enjoying database-specific performance benefits that are not available with generic NAS.

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of deploying Oracle over NFS using fast networks (which can even perform better than fiber), the problem with NFS is that it isn’t database-centric in its roots. First, you need support at both the storage level and the client level: you need to run a NetAPP filler (NFS on EMC isn’t as good) and have Linux as the operating system for optimal performance. Second, tuning NAS for Oracle, while doable, isn’t easy. Oracle made great progress in 11g with the DirectNFS client but it is a Liunx/NETAPP only solution.

Most organizations have a mix of Linux/Unix/Windows servers with both EMC and Netapp equipment in the storage layer. Using Network ASM could really make the storage layer transparent from the database prospective. Think of it as Cloud Storage for Oracle Databases. All databases would have a single, redundant, POC for storage. Your Oracle Instance could access both EMC and NetAPP machines easily and transparently over the network. All the benefits of regular ASM would apply here as well - being able to add disks, remove disks, strip and load-balance on the fly.

COS - Cloud-computing Oracle Storage or N-ASM - Netowrked ASM.

Remember where you heard it first!