Extending Automatic Storage Management to

Manage ALL Data

Oracle Database 11g Release 2
Ara Shakian
Principal Product Manager

Oracle Confidential
 The following is intended to outline our general
product direction. It is intended for information
purposes only, and may not be incorporated into any
contract. It is not a commitment to deliver any
material, code, or functionality, and should not be
relied upon in making purchasing decisions.
The development, release, and timing of any
features or functionality described for Oracle’s
products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

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 Table of Contents

• Storage management challenges

• ASM Overview
• ASM in 11gR2 takes it the next level
• What is it
• How does it work
• How do I manage it
• Benefits
• How do I get from here to ASM
• ASM reference customers

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 Challenges of Managing
Data Explosion

• Lack of a single optimal solution for all data

• Lack of automation to reduce complexity
• Managing multiple software layers
• Complexity of managing performance
• Eliminating hot spots
• Multi-vendor support logistics and finger
pointing
• Reducing storage Total Cost of Ownership

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 ASM Is Most Popular
Storage Manager
• De-facto standard for RAC and grid
deployments, >65%
• De-facto standard for VLDB
deployments
• Large and growing adoption for
single instance deployments, >20%
• Thousands of customers using ASM
• One of the most popular features in
the database

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 ASM is Storage Management Platform of Choice
An optimal storage management solution for
database and general purpose files

• Simplifies and automates storage management

ASM Disk Group • Integrated cluster and single node framework
ASM Disk
• Storage pooling with easy provisioning
ASM Disk
ASM Disk • Optimal performance by default
ASM Disk
ASM Disk • Best availability and scalability
• Lowest TCO
• Consolidates and eliminates waste
• No additional cost
• Manages ALL data 11.2

Lowers the cost of storage management

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 Dynamic Rebalancing
• Simple provisioning
• Add, drop or resize

ASM Disk
ASM Disk ASM Disk
ASM Disk ASM Disk

Benefits:
Disk Group
• On-line capacity management
• Eliminates manual I/O tuning
• Maintain optimal performance
• Storage migration on line

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 Enables Storage Consolidation
Clustered Pool of Storage

Local Area Network

• Shared storage across
several databases
RAC RDBMS RDBMS • RAC and Single Instance
ASM ASM ASM
ERP FIN CRM HR

• Benefits:
ERP Database • Simplified and Centralized
HR Database management
CRM Database
• Higher storage utilization
• Higher performance
FIN Database

ASM Disk Group

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 Striping, Mirroring and Performance

• Striping designed to meet

• RDBMS I/O characteristics
• General purpose files
• Flexible file-based mirroring
• External, Normal and High
• Optimal performance ASM
• No tuning

Non-ASM
Percentage
relative to
Baseline
(TPS)
Time

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 Why You Should Care

• Reduced complexity thru automation

• No I/O tuning, reshuffling data files
• Simplified solution stack
• No finger pointing, 3rd party LVM/FS
• Increases utilization and database and
application uptime
• No down-time for storage provisioning or migration
• Managing storage pool vs. islands
• Single vendor cross-platform integrated solution
• Bundled and tested as one solution
• Same cross platform tools to install, configure and manage
• No additional cost!

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 Taking It To The Next Level
With
ASM in 11gR2

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 Oracle Grid Infrastructure
(ASM + Oracle Clusterware)

• ASM and Oracle Clusterware integrated and installed in

a single ‘Grid Infrastructure’ home
• Integrated installation, configuration and upgrade
• Installed using Oracle Universal Installer (OUI)
• Not a part of database install
• Option to minimally configure ASM and ACFS
• Automate creation of Oracle DB Homes on ACFS

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 ASM Configuration Assistant (ASMCA)
• One tool to initialize & manage • Manage ASM before db install
* Disk Groups
• Upgrade previous versions of ASM
* Dynamic Volumes
to the current version (11g R2)
* ACFS file systems

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 Extending ASM to Manage ALL Data

Database RAC Application 3rd Party FS

Automatic Storage Management (ASM)

ACFS Snapshot

ASM Cluster & Single

ASM Instance Node File System
(ACFS)
Managing
Oracle DB Files
Dynamic Volume Manager

Database Files General Purpose Files

ASM Dynamic Volumes
DB
DBDatafiles
Datafiles
Disk Database files
ACFS FS 3rd
Oracle Party
Group OCR & Voting files Bin FS

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 What is ASM Dynamic Volume Manager

OS • A new cluster (and single host) volume

/dev/asm/vol1-123 management service
• Standard disk device interface to clients
ASM DG • Loadable kernel driver
+DATA/vol1 • Dynamic Volume is a volume file created
in an ASM disk group (new file type
‘asmvol’)
• An OS device file is created automatically when
a dynamic volume is created
• Managed by SQL/ASMCMD and EM

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 What is ASM Cluster File System
(ACFS)
• General purpose scalable file system
• Journaling, extent based
• Single node and cluster
• POSIX, X/OPEN file system solution for UNIX/Linux
• Windows file system solution for Windows platforms
• Accessible through NAS protocols (NFS, CIFS)
• Leverages ASM technology for volume mgt
• Integrated with Oracle Clusterware for cluster support
• Multi OS platform (Linux and Windows at initial release)
• Integrated with Oracle system mgt tools
• Oracle installation and configuration
• Enterprise Manager and ASM Storage mgt tools
• Native OS File System Management tools

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 What are ACFS Snapshots
• Dynamic, fast,
space efficient, “point in time” read-only
copies of ACFS file system files
• Captures ASM FS file block/extent updates
• An enabler for:
• On-line, disk-based, file backup model using snapshots
• Individual file recoveries
• Up to 64 snapshot images per ASM file system
• Policy based snapshots:
Schedule snapshots on an interval basis: every 5
seconds, every 30 minutes, daily, …

• Create an ACFS snapshots

• acfsutil snap create snap_name mountp

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 Leveraging the Power of ASM
ACFS File System: /usr1
• Even distribution of data ACFS file A Mirrored
ACFS file B Mirrored
• Dynamic provisioning
Dynamic volumes and Linux: /dev/asm/vol1
ACFS FS may be resized Win: \\.\asm_dgname_volname
leveraging ASM file resize
features
% asmcmd volresize dga vol1 -s 50G +DATA/dga/vol1

• Can also use Enterprise

Manager for management
and threshold alerts 1
3
1

Primary ASM File Extent

Mirrored ASM file Extents

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 Managing the Dymanic Volumes and
ACFS File System
Is Simple And Flexible

1. Native Linux, UNIX, and Windows OS file system

commands and extensions
2. acfsutil platform independent commands
3. ASM Configuration Assistant (ASMCA)
4. Enterprise Manager

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 An Example: Creating an ACFS File
System

$ mkfs -t acfs -b 4k /dev/asm/volume1-62 ; Create fs on ASM volume

$ su - root
# mount -t acfs /dev/asm/volume1-62 /tmp/images
# su – oracle_usr

$ acfsutil registry -a /dev/asm/volume1-62 /tmp/images

$ mount –t acfs –o all none none ; Mount everything in the registry

$ cd /tmp/images
$ cp /home/my_images .

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 ACFS Use Cases

• Oracle Home
• Shared or node-local
• Not Grid Infrastructure home
• External files
• Application binaries
• Not an OS boot FS

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 Managing
Oracle Database Files

ASM Core Enhancements

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 ASM 11g Release 2 New Features
for
Database Files
• All files on ASM
• Oracle Cluster Registry,
Voting Disk and SPFILE
• Tunable Performance
• Intelligent Data Placement
(IDP)
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• Improved Management
• Full Featured ASMCMD
• ASM File Access Control
• ASM Disk Group Rename
• Datafile to Disk Mapping
• Installation &
Configuration mgt
• ASM Install & Configuration
Assistant (ASMCA)
 OCR and Voting Disk on ASM

• OCR is a regular ASM file

• A new ASM file type
• Voting Disk
• Stored in selected ASM disks
• ‘crsctl’ used to specify a disk group for Voting disks
• ASM auto creates1/3/5 Voting Disks based on
Ext/Normal/High redundancy on Failure Groups
• Quorum failure group
• ASM determines redundancy for OCR and Voting Disk
based on disk group redundancy level
• ASM SPFILE is also supported on ASM now

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 Intelligent Data Placement (IDP)

• Placement of files on high performance Hot Files

regions of disk
• 50% performance difference from outer to
inner tracks
• Classify or mark an ASM file to be
HOT/COLD
• Alter diskgroup dgname modify file ‘xxx’
attributes HOT/COLD or
based on a templates at creation time
• Rebalance to migrate the ‘file’ to HOT/COLD
IDP region
• IDP regions are dynamic Disk Platter
• New V$ASMFILE recording IO stats
• The IDP feature better leveraged when ASM Cold Files
disks are whole disks

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 Complete ASMCMD Functionality
A complete API for the system admin
• Extending ASMCMD to manage:
• ASM instance (startup/shutdown, init.ora, .)
• Disk group, disk and failure group (create, mount,
add, drop, …)
• Attribute (list, set)
• User/Group (add user, change password, …)
• Template (list, add, alter drop)
• Iostat and df
• lsof: list files that are open by ASM
lsod: list disks that are open by ASM
• Dynamic Volume

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 Other Features

• ASM File Access Control (ACL)

• Introducing 3 classes of permissions:
• owner, group, and other
• ASM Disk Group Rename
• Oracle File Mapping support (OFM)
• View mapping of datafiles to physical devices
• 4k sector size disk I/O support
• Possible values are: 512b or 4096b (4k)

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 In Summary…

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 One Integrated Solution for ALL Data

Simple Low Cost High Performance Always On-Line

Scalable Optimal Utilization

ACFS Snapshot

Un-structured One Management

Data ASM Cluster FS
Interface
ASM Database files &
Structured Dynamic Volumes One Install and
Data Oracle Database
Oracle Clusterware
Configure
&
RAC One Clusterware
Framework

Cross Platform One Vendor for

Linux, Windows, Solaris, Support
HP-UX, AIX

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 Some ASM Reference Customers In Production

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