Oracle ACFS is designed as a general-purpose, standalone server and clusterwide file system that delivers support for all customer files. Users and applications can access and manage Oracle ACFS using native operating system file system application programming interfaces (APIs) and command-line interface (CLI) tools. Users can also manage Oracle ACFS with Oracle ASM Configuration Assistant (ASMCA).
Oracle ACFS supports large files with 64-bit file and file system data structure sizes leading to exabyte capable file and file system capacities on 64 bit platforms. Variable extent-based storage allocation and high-performance directories contribute to fast performance and shared disk configurations that provide direct storage paths to Oracle ACFS file data from each cluster member. File system integrity and fast recovery is achieved with Oracle ACFS metadata checksums and journaling. Oracle ACFS is designed as a multi-node, shared file system model that delivers coherent, cached, direct storage paths to Oracle ACFS file data from each cluster member.
Oracle ACFS files systems are typically configured for clusterwide access. File systems, files, and directories are visible and accessible from all cluster members and can be referenced by users and applications using the same path names from any cluster member. This design enables simplified application deployments across cluster members and facilitates both multiple instance cluster applications and high availability (HA) failover of unmodified standalone server applications.
Oracle ACFS presents single system file access semantics across cluster configurations. Applications and users on all cluster members are always presented with the same view of shared Oracle ACFS file data, supported by the Oracle ACFS clusterwide user and metadata cache coherency mechanism.