ASM BEST PRACTICES FOR ‘DATA’ DISKGROUP(S)
In our quest to reduce operating costs we are consolidating databases and eliminating RAC in favor of standalone servers. This is a business decision that is a certainty. Our SAN has been upgraded, and the new database servers are newer, faster, etc.
Our database version is 11.2.0.4 with Grid Infrastructure 12.1.0.1. Our data diskgroup is RAID-5 and our fra is RAID-1+0. ASM has external redundancy. All disks are of equal size with equal storage performance and availability.
Previously our databases were on separate clusters by function: OLTP, REPORTING and ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT. Development/Acceptance shared a cluster, while production was separate.
The new architecture combines different functions onto one server for dev/acc, and another for production. This means they will all be using the same ASM instance. Typically we followed Oracle’s recommendation to have two disk groups, one for data and the other for FRA. That followed well when the database was the only one using the data diskgroup. Now that we are coming databases, is the best practice still to have one data diskgroup and one FRA diskgroup? For example, production will house 3 databases. OLTP is 500 GB, Reporting is 1.3 TB, and Enterprise Content Management is 6 TB