Oracle ASM and Amazon EBS

When setting up Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) on Amazon Web Services (AWS), both Oracle ASM (Automatic Storage Management) and Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Store) play crucial roles:

Oracle ASM:

• Storage Management: Oracle ASM simplifies storage management by automating tasks such as disk provisioning, striping, and mirroring. It provides a centralized storage management solution for Oracle databases, including RAC.
• High Availability: ASM supports high availability features by enabling automatic failover and data redundancy, ensuring minimal downtime and data loss.
• Performance: ASM optimizes performance by distributing I/O load across multiple disks and dynamically rebalancing storage as needed.

Amazon EBS:

• Persistent Storage: Amazon EBS provides block-level storage volumes that can be attached to EC2 instances. These volumes persist independently of the life of the instance, making them ideal for database storage.
• Multi-AZ Support: EBS volumes can be replicated across multiple Availability Zones (AZs), providing high availability and disaster recovery capabilities.
• Performance: EBS offers different types of storage volumes (e.g., General Purpose SSD, Provisioned IOPS SSD) that cater to various performance needs. For Oracle RAC, using EBS volumes with Multi-Attach feature allows multiple EC2 instances to access the same EBS volume simultaneously.

Combined Role in Oracle RAC on AWS:

• Shared Storage: Oracle ASM manages the shared storage for Oracle RAC, while Amazon EBS provides the underlying block storage volumes.
• High Availability and Scalability: The combination of Oracle ASM and Amazon EBS ensures high availability, scalability, and efficient storage management for Oracle RAC deployments on AWS.