Storage Foundation Volume Manager Operations will co-exist with Oracle ASM (Automatic Storage Management) without any performance penalties.  VERITAS Storage Foundation Dynamic Multi-Pathing provides Seamless Multi-path failover capabilities and is complementary to ASM for both high availability and performance.  Customers who wish to use Oracle ASM and VERITAS Storage Foundation together should be careful to follow the procedures.  Oracle ASM is a new feature of Oracle 10g to streamline storage management and provisioning.  ASM provides volume and (CLUSTER) file-system management where the IO subsystem is directly handled by the oracle kernel.  With Oracle 10g and ASM it is possible to build a scalable and highly available storage infrastructure built on low-cost hardware.  A typical example is using SATA HD with fiber channel controllers arranged in a SAN network.  A scalable architecture built on low-cost HW is deployed at CERN combining ASM and Oracle log RAC on Linux. Dynamic Multi-Pathing (DMP) which provides wide storage array support for protection from failures and performance bottlenecks in the HBAs AND SAN switches.  Real Application Clusters (RAC) is parallel database environment that takes advantage of the processing power of multiple computers.  The Oracle database is the physical data stored in table spaces on disk, while the Oracle instance is a set of processes and shared memory that provide access to the physical database.  Specifically, the instance involves server processes acting on behalf of clients to read data into shared memory and make modifications to it, and background processes to write changed data to disk. In traditional environments, only on instance accesses a database at a specific time.  SF Oracle RAC enables all nodes to concurrently run Oracle instances and execute transactions against the same database.  This software coordinates access to the shared data for each node to provide consistency and integrity.  Each node adds its processing power to the cluster as a whole and can increase overall throughput or performance.