Replication Agent for Oracle supports the use of the Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) feature. ASM provides file system and volume management support for an Oracle database environment. ASM can be used in both Real Application Cluster (RAC) and non-RAC environments.
ASM provides similar benefits as a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) or a logical volume manager (LVM). Similar to those technologies, ASM allows the definition of a single disk group from a collection of individual disks. ASM attempts to balance loads across all devices defined in the disk group. ASM also provides striping and mirroring capabilities.
Unlike RAID or LVMs, ASM only supports files created and read by the Oracle database. ASM cannot be used for a general-purpose file system and cannot store binaries or flat files. Also, ASM files cannot be directly accessed by the operating system.
