As a follow on to both Mark's and my responses - both ASE and IQ can use raw devices in Linux.
These devices are generally block devices (e.g. /dev/sd<x>, etc) that are then mapped to raw devices (I won't get into mirror devices, LVMs etc). Depending on the version of Linux, the raw module may be automatically loaded or not to provide the initial /dev/raw/rawctl node required by the 'raw' command. The raw mapping can be done by the 'raw' command or at system start up using such things as udev rules or services.
The underlying block devices can still be owned by root, but the raw devices should be owned by the userid that starts the ASE or IQ (e.g. 'sybase') while the /dev/raw/rawctl node access can be defined as chmod 666 while still remaining owned by root.
The point here is that while file system devices allocate space on a file system and can be seen by the system and admins, raw and block devices should be carefully tracked in your system. ASE and IQ will allocate the complete device for data, but the OS or SAN admin has no way of knowing that the device has been allocated for use by a database. It may still show as a free partition on the device.
Track block device usage carefully to prevent someone else from using the space for another purpose and corrupting your database.
With IQ you would simply run sp_iqfile and look at the physical file location. You can output the stored procedure output and just perform an 'ls -al' on each "file" to see if it is a raw device or filesystem device.
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