Chris, Oracle positions its clusterware to be used INSTEAD of 3-rd party products. ASM there plays role of volume management. Oracle CRS can work standalone as well as on top of your existing clusterware (if supported depending on vendor/platform). So in latter case you don't lose it... in the fist case you just don't have it with Oracle CRS. :) Btw, if you know that ASM is in fact an Oracle database running in mount state without any datafiles, would you ever seriously consider using it?! ;-) And guess what? When this central ASM instance goes down, all databases connected to it (read using ASM) are going down as well. Regards, Alex > I have zero experience with 10g RAC, but a I was talking to another DBA = > who was looking in the same thing. > He believed that with a 3rd party clusterware, you would HAVE TO use = > Oracle storage manager - ASM? which is *new* software/process AND you = > don't get all of the other benefits that a modern Cluster Manager = > would/might provide. You would/might loose NIC/IP failover, filesystem = > failover, etc...all things the Oracle can live without but you = > applications may not? > > Take all of this with a grain of salt...and share what you find out. > > Chris Marquez -- Best regards, Alex Gorbachev -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l