Hi Kevin, and thank you for keeping the discussion public. It is really interesting. I can only contribute with a not-too-technical real life experience on ASM. I have two in production, used for single instance databases, with external redundancy (why to implement a software raid if I have a good hw controller?). So far I haven't got any issue and the performance is good. I consider it a possible alternative to raw devices on LVM. Still I'm unsure if ASM is a mature solution especially for high load, given the published bugs on metalink. I'm still obesrving its behaviour. Just another consideration: am I the only one who believes we will see a sort of oracle-os-kernel "in order to minimize the overhead of having an operating system installed on the machine"? Fabrizio -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l