ASM is Oracle's volume manager technology.

First it felt like a real voodoo: I created volumes but the OS cannot really access them (i.e. how the hell do I list the files, check out free space, etc).

Then a quick search revealed the very useful (RAC-builtin) command asmcmd which reminds of a crippled Unix shell, supporting ls, cd, du commands, and some more.

(Maybe someone wants to write a FUSE plugin to ASM, so we could actually mount it? 🙂 )