What is automated storage management (ASM)?

What is automated storage management (ASM)?

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Automated storage management (ASM) is a new storage mechanism available in Oracle 10g. ASM is a simple storage management interface available to the DBA. ASM is consistent across the server and storage platforms. It provides beneficial tools to the DBA to create and manage a robust, flexible, and scalable file storage system, ready for access by any existing Oracle database instance.
ASM provides various tools that can save the DBA's time and flexibility to manage a dynamic database environment with increased efficiency.

ASM is designed to release the burden of disk and storage management, and depends on Oracle to maintain database storage. Instead of managing many data files individually, ASM creates disk groups for file management. Therefore, a disk group can be defined as a logical unit that Oracle views as a single unit of storage. This is very much akin to various flavors of Unix defining volume groups.

Oracle manages storage definitions of a database in a second database used exclusively by ASM to keep track of disk group allocations. While creating a database, if the ASM option is selected at the storage option window, then guidance about the process of defining the secondary ASM database instance is provided via a series of windows. ASM also employs a unique naming convention based on Oracle Flexible architecture (OFA).

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