Oracle on shared storage
Some Oracle customers have been told (usually by Oracle sales) that all hosts connected to a shared storage array need to be fully licensed. In some cases they even claim that the processors in the storage array itself need to be licensed.
This is incorrect as explained below.
Licensing requirements
Oracle contracts state that "every processor in the virtualized or clustered environment must be fully licensed since Oracle software is considered to be “installed and/or running” on the entire environment."
As one cannot "install" or "run" Oracle software on a shared storage array in a regular way, the array itself needs no Oracle license. It does not matter if the array is a physical (RAID) shared storage array, or built using dedicated "software defined storage" such as PowerFlex.
The fact that the array is used as (block or file) storage for Oracle software (binaries) is not relevant. Think of it as copying Oracle binaries to a USB stick. Doing so would not require you to license the USB stick, it is simply a hardware device for storing digital data.
Edge cases
Some hyperconverged platforms (such as DellEMC VxRail, some configurations of DellEMC PowerFlex) and some physical storage arrays (DellEMC PowerStore) have storage nodes that also serve for compute (i.e. they run virtual machines). In that case only those nodes actually running the Oracle software (or having it installed at the VM level) need to be licensed.
Oracle's own platforms
A good example is Oracle Supercluster. Supercluster has Exadata storage nodes (only used for database storage), ZFS appliance (shared storage for things like Oracle binaries, application software, Operating Systems, maybe even virtual machines or container images.
Oracle does not require the non-database nodes to be licensed for Oracle database. Only the actual software running on the nodes (such as middleware or applications) needs to be properly licensed.
Customers
At Dell we have several customers who have succesfully applied these rules. We can share more details on request.