Oracle 10g ASM Disk Group Question

Short Overview: Our Oracle 10g RAC Database system is currently configured on two servers running Windows 2003 with all datafiles located on 5 raid 5 striped SAN disk drives. Some our disk groups are managed by ASM but not all of them.

I'm fairly new to the Oracle world so I hope you can help.

Is there any benefit in creating a large number of small luns or will it just add admistrative overhead? For example, the person who set up the configuration decided to create this one datafile group at 50GB but it seems like he's always asking our network admin to create additional luns on the SAN (50GB) and then adding them to the diskfile group to allow for additional growth. The space is managed by ASM.

I can't imagine that we are really getting any benefit by doing this. What do you all think?

Also, he only wants to add 50GB at a time, could we not just add a bigger chunk to help eliminate all of this adding of space? I am aware that in the configuration of ASM it talks about adding disks of similar size and performance charateristics but since we are on a SAN and the drives are all striped and we are running everything on 5 drives anyway, does it really even matter? Just to clarify even when we add more space we're just adding it using those same 5 drives

I look forward to your replies.
Thanks Received on Tue Apr 25 2006 - 10:41:10 CDT