I was browsing through the OraNA.info posts and found an interesting post from Steve Karam which referred to a metalink Note:578455.1 – Announcement of De-Support of RAW devices in Release 12G
If you go through the note, it mentions desupport of Raw devices from Oracle Database 12G. Article also lists out possibility of using ASM,OCFS as few of the alternative storage mediums for keeping OCR and Voting Disks (Used in Oracle Real Application Clusters(RAC)) .
OCFS2 already supports the storage of OCR and Voting Disk. But note also talks about ASM will be supporting the files. Hmmm… If this has to be true, lot of changes will be required in the architecture. Currently ASM instance starts after CSS (and other clusterware services in RAC) service has been started . But this change will mean that ASM has to start before these processes. Currently if you try to start the ASM instance with CSS service down, you get following error
[oracle@blrraclnx2 ~]$ export ORACLE_SID=+ASM1 [oracle@blrraclnx2 ~]$ sqlplus SQL*Plus: Release 10.2.0.1.0 - Production on Sun Aug 10 08:16:09 2008 Copyright (c) 1982, 2005, Oracle. All rights reserved. Enter user-name: / as sysdba Connected to an idle instance. SQL> startup ORA-29701: unable to connect to Cluster Manager SQL> exit Disconnected [oracle@blrraclnx2 ~]$ oerr ora 29701 29701, 00000, "unable to connect to Cluster Manager" // *Cause: Connect to CM failed or timed out. // *Action: Verify that the CM was started. If the CM was not started, // start it and then retry the database startup. If the CM died // or is not responding, check the Oracle and CM trace files for // errors.
Apart from changing the architecture, it will also involve lot of effort from Oracle DBA’s to unlearn and learn new concepts 
At the same time, it will help you start the ASM Instance even though CSS is not up!! (I know many people will be having a sigh of relief after reading the last line) Or is there something else in store for us! There are also lot of RAC and ASM features expected in 11gR2. So let’s wait and watch..
