A cluster requires a shared storage area that is accessible to all the cluster members. The supported types of shared storage depend upon the platform you are using, for example:
- Oracle Automatic Storage Management (strongly recommended).
- Network File System (NFS), which is not supported on Linux on POWER or on IBM zSeries Based Linux.
- OCFS2 for Linux, or General Parallel File System (GPFS) on IBM platforms.
- Oracle also provides Oracle Advanced Cluster File system (Oracle ACFS), which is a general purpose cluster file system built on an Oracle ASM cluster
The storage is presented to the Operating system as block storage such as a partition, or as a file system such as typical mount point and directory structure as with Oracle ACFS.
Any shared storage must be cluster aware and certified for use with Oracle RAC Database.