Question:
I hear the buzzword about 'the cloud?, and ?Oracle cloud
computing?, yet it all seems like marketing vapourware. Is Oracle
really doing anything concrete in cloud computing? I have heard
about a new Oracle cloud Filesystem, is this ?OCF? real? Cheers!
Answer: The sharing of computing resources has been around since the
1970's, and the concept of cloud computing is as old as your
Grandma's drawers. However, you are correct, Oracle has introduced a
new Oracle Cloud Filesystem (OCF) as part of their cloud computing
initiative.
The Oracle ?cloud filesystem? is a bit of hype. It is simply the new
name for the device media control language (DMCL) between the
logical tablespaces seen by the applications, the exact same
transparency layer we saw in the IDMS CODASYL database of the early
1980's. This same technology was used in standard cluster file
systems used by early OPS and RAC databases.
The Oracle cloud filesystem is a fancy name for the ASM components
(ASMCMD, ASM CFS and ASM DVM) and the underlying ASM disk groups.
Oracle has renamed these existing ASM components first introduced in
Oracle 11g release 2 as part of the Oracle cloud filesystem:
In sum, the Oracle Cloud Filesystem is indeed a buzzword, but it
truly describes a collection of ASM tools that separate the logical
tablespaces from the physical data files.
