RAC 11gR2 shared storage concepts

Hi All,

I'm DBA but not hardware specialist.
We would like to implement RAC on two nodes on windows OS using 11gR2
I'm not familiar with shared storage concepts.
My question is :

1. Must shared storage be implemented as some physical Independent computer with some disk space or can it be just some disk space to which two RAC nodes with HBA cards each has access ?
2. If it can be only disk space how is this sharing realized ? Through Clusterware software and ASM ?

Many thanks in advance.

Kind Regards Arek Masny

It has to be a separate disk storage system, SAN or disk arrays. But you can setup one node RAC with local disks. This is not meant to provide any high availability but allows you to learn RAC setup and test it.

Storage should be either SAN (preferred) or NAS and for file storage you can use the below options based on your business requirement and RAC design.

ASM (preferred)
OCFS
RAW

Thanks,