AFM DR deployment considerations and best practices

For AFM DR deployment, it is important to know the characteristics of AFM DR including advantages and limitations, its deployment method, and best practices.

AFM DR is a file-level asynchronous disaster recovery solution. Replication of data to a secondary cluster is asynchronous, which means that the data that is created on the primary cluster is copied to the secondary cluster with delay. The amount of delay is determined by the network bandwidth between the sites and some IBM Storage Scale tuning parameters.

AFM DR copies only the data blocks that changed on the primary cluster to the secondary cluster, which makes it an efficient replication mechanism.

Since data replication is asynchronous by using AFM DR to recover data after a primary cluster failure might cause some data loss. The amount of data that is lost depends on the amount of data that is in the primary queue when a failure occurs. Therefore, AFM DR is not the right disaster recovery solution if your application cannot tolerate possible data loss. If this loss is not acceptable, customers must implement a synchronous disaster recovery mechanism.