Oracle ASM vs. Veritas Storage Foundation for Oracle

Did anybody do performance comparison between Oracle ASM and Veritas Storage Foundation for Oracle? In fact, this is what I am doing right at this moment. So far within the same server (Sun 440) and storage unit (IBM Shark) ASM works about 18% faster on writing to the database but reads are 34% slower on ASM than they are on Veritas filesystem. I'm using the same 8K blocks for identical 4.7M rows tables (all storage parameters are the same).

On any event, I would appreciate if you can share your experience using ASM in large production environment including potential problems (this is the first release or the software that implements this feature) and advantages you experienced in working with it.

Here is environment we are about to work in: 4 x OLTP instances 0.5Tb each plus 1 x DW instance .75Tb OLTP instances are fully identical and redundant and located in two different sites (two per site). Most likely, we will be implementing RAC with in one year but not yet (budget constraints). If I understand correctly, ASM will help us in accomplishing more transparent migration over to RAC configuration in the future(correct me if I am wrong).

Waiting for your response.
Thanks,
Sergey

I do not have benchmark result on ASM vs volume manager.
But my question is :
why does oracle want to enter into a new segment i.e RAID LEVEL?

ASM has both mirroring and striping features to provide a robust (??) file system. It spreads the database objects (object extents) over multiple devices on a round robin basis.

Basically it tries to eliminate 3rd party logical volume manager.
Why ?
Does oracle want to take over Veritas?

Tamil

Hi Tamil

I think it wants to win the TCO war in the database market.

Oracle can say i give you storage management also when you buy the database :-)

when you buy sybase or db2 you need to buy storage software from veritas adding to your TCO.

regards
Hrishy

Quote:

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Originally posted by tamilselvan
I do not have benchmark result on ASM vs volume manager.
But my question is :
why does oracle want to enter into a new segment i.e RAID LEVEL?

ASM has both mirroring and striping features to provide a robust (??) file system. It spreads the database objects (object extents) over multiple devices on a round robin basis.

Basically it tries to eliminate 3rd party logical volume manager.
Why ?
Does oracle want to take over Veritas?

Tamil

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Well... ASM does not necessarily mean RAID. For instance, we use hardware RAID with its cache and other functionality. I agree ASM is not that convenient in terms of management as regular filesystems are (moving files, been able to temporarily store non-database files, etc...). In fact, Oracle entered other vendors' territory with their cluster software for the database. This is where other vendors used to rule for long time but will experience pretty substantial competition going forward. In fact, ASM is a part of Oracle clustering because it provides storage capability for it. I wouldn't really consider doing ASM on a production system with first release of 10g if there is no need for going into clustering in the future (actually there is an immediate need but management does not want to spend money on the project until it starts generating profit).


Sergey