Data Mirroring and Replication
The ability to detect and quickly recover from a massive hardware failure is of paramount importance to businesses that make use of real-time data processing systems.
GPFS™ provides a number of features that facilitate the implementation of highly-available GPFS environments capable of withstanding catastrophic hardware failures. By maintaining a replica of the file system's data at a geographically-separate location, the system sustains its processing using the secondary replica of the file system in the event of a total failure in the primary environment.
On a high level, a disaster-resilient GPFS cluster is made up of two or three, distinct, geographically-separate hardware sites operating in a coordinated fashion. Two of the sites consist of GPFS nodes and storage resources holding a complete replica of the file system. If a third site is active, it consists of a single node and a single disk used as a tiebreaker for GPFS quorum. In the event of a catastrophic hardware failure that disables the operation of an entire site, and assuming the tiebreaker site remains operational, file system services fail over to the remaining subset of the cluster and continue serving the data using the replica of the file system that survived the disaster. However, if the tiebreaker fails during the disaster, the remaining number of nodes and disks is insufficient to satisfy the quorum rules and the surviving site loses access to the GPFS file system. A manual procedure is needed to instruct GPFS to disregard the existing quorum assignments and continue operating with whatever resources are available.
- Synchronous mirroring utilizing GPFS replication.
The data and metadata replication features of GPFS are used to implement synchronous mirroring between a pair of geographically-separate sites. The use of logical replication-based mirroring offers a generic solution that relies on no specific support from the disk subsystem beyond the basic ability to read and write data blocks. For more information, see Synchronous mirroring with GPFS replication.
- Synchronous mirroring utilizing
storage-based replication.
Hardware replication creates persistent mirroring relationship between pairs of Logical Units (LUNs) on two subsystems connected over SAN or LAN links. All updates performed on the set of primary, source, or LUNs appear in the same order on the secondary, target, or disks in the target subsystem. Hardware replication provides for an exact bitwise replica of the content of the source as seen at the time of the failure on the target if the source volume fails. A range of technologies can be used to provide synchronous replication such as Metro Mirror on DS8000® or Storwize® or Synchronous Remote Mirroring on XIV®.
- Asynchronous mirroring utilizing GPFS-based replication.
Asynchronous replication functionality provides a similar crash consistent copy of data as synchronous replication but in normal operation the secondary copy of data will lag behind the primary by some period of time. For more information, see AFM-based Asynchronous Disaster Recovery (AFM DR).
- Asynchronous mirroring utilizing
storage-based replication.
Asynchronous replication functionality provides a similar crash consistent copy of data as synchronous replication but in normal operation the secondary copy of data will lag behind the primary by some time. A range of technologies can be used to provide asynchronous replication such as Global Mirror on DS8000 or Storwize or Asynchronous Remote Mirroring on XIV.
- Point in time copy using storage-based
functionality.
Periodic point-in-time copies of the file system are taken using the functionality such as FlashCopy® on the DS8000 or Storwize or Snapshot on XIV. This copy could be used as a source of a complete file system consistent backup to be taken to a remote site or could be used in conjunction with other replication capabilities to use for isolated testing of disaster recovery procedures.
The primary advantage of both synchronous mirroring methods is the minimization of the risk of permanent data loss. Both methods provide two consistent, up-to-date replicas of the file system, each available for recovery if the other one fails. However, inherent to all solutions that synchronously mirror data over a wide area network link is the latency penalty that is induced by the replicated write I/Os. This makes both synchronous mirroring methods prohibitively inefficient for certain types of performance-oriented applications of where there is a longer distance between sites. The asynchronous method effectively eliminates this penalty but in a situation where the primary site is lost, there might be updates that have not yet been transferred to the secondary site. Asynchronous replication will still provide a crash consistent and restartable copy of the primary data.