It's been suggested to me (by a DB vendor) to use Oracle ASM to manage the disks presented to Linux for our servers hosting Oracle DBs. The disks are hosted on a C-Mode 9.7 array (All Flash). I cannot see the benefit of this with an all flash array. (RAID10 DP and WAFL). ASM seems to utilize stripping at the OS layer and manages the disk groupings. Perhaps on a very I/O intensive workload this would be beneficial but with our NetApp array being all flash seems to me to needlessly complicate matters.
Some aspects of ASM that concern me:
- Does NetApp Snapcentre 4.4. suppor t it (seems to)
- Does this tie the disk to only the Oracle layer i.e. seems like you cannot write an arbitrary file to these disk with using ASM tooling? What is the impact for other tools (AV, backup tools)
- Other aspects?
I'd be very interested to here from people that are using ASM with NetApp arrays and what their use cases were.