ASM – Automatic Storage Management – was introduced by Oracle with the Oracle Database 10g back in 2002.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even at the first release the promises on enabling easy storage management and a IO distribution automization that fitted the the usage for an Oracle database was delivered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since then a lot of enterprises round the globe has adopted using ASM and at the same time by strength of numbers ensured that bugs has been ironed out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is still though possible to encounter DBA’s which are not aware about the benefits of ASM – and when being explained about this they can usually hardly wait to deploy ASM.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If these DBA’s are also introduced to big-file tablespaces there is almost no end to their expectations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is however a benefit of ASM, that came as a very<\/strong> pleasant discovery for me and this is what this post is concerning – and: “No, this is not part of the Oracle University lecture on ASM<\/em>“.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The story behind was that a large enterprise suffered a massive ransomware attack, destroying – among a lot of things – the Oracle database servers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even if these were protected by Dataguard deployed on two sites, the network topology did not include sufficient separation between the sites to prevent the ransomware from spreading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ransomware corrupted files on the Windows servers – and even if it was claimed to have a default operation of “just” corrupting documents and the like – it was corrupting all<\/strong> files – and somehow “sqlplus.exe.locked” did not work as “sqlplus.exe” \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n\n\n\n Good thing though: it only<\/strong> currupted files; finding and accessing raw disks without filesystem, without drive label nor drive letter was not possible for the ransomware code.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The happy consequence of this was, that after installing the Oracle software on a fresh server and mounting the old ASM disks from the corrupted server the original ASM diskgroups came up and after some time (possibly doing some clean-up after what must have been seen as a server crash) all datafiles, a set of redologs and a controlfile was “still there” and after making the necessary restoration of “multiplexed” redologs and controlfiles the database came up with no dataloss. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Conclusion: ASM provided by its very core functionality an extra layer of protection against security breaches like ransomware attacks.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ASM – Automatic Storage Management – was introduced by Oracle with the Oracle Database 10g back in 2002. Even at the first release the promises on enabling easy storage management and a IO distribution automization that fitted the the usage for an Oracle database was delivered. Since then a lot of enterprises round the globe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-databaseconf","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berg-consult.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berg-consult.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berg-consult.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berg-consult.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berg-consult.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.berg-consult.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/445\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berg-consult.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berg-consult.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berg-consult.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}