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