This section introduces disaster tolerance and describes the data replication methods that Sun StorageTek Availability Suite software uses.
Disaster tolerance is the ability of a system to restore an application on an alternate cluster when the primary cluster fails. Disaster tolerance is based on data replication and failover. Failover is the automatic relocation of a resource group or device group from a primary cluster to a secondary cluster. If the primary cluster fails, the application and the data are immediately available on the secondary cluster.
This section describes the remote mirror replication method and the point-in-time snapshot method used by Sun StorageTek Availability Suite software. This software uses the sndradm(1RPC) and iiadm(1II) commands to replicate data.
Figure 4–3 shows remote mirror replication. Data from the master volume of the primary disk is replicated to the master volume of the secondary disk through a TCP/IP connection. A remote mirror bitmap tracks differences between the master volume on the primary disk and the master volume on the secondary disk.
Remote mirror replication can be performed synchronously in real time, or asynchronously. Each volume set in each cluster can be configured individually, for synchronous replication or asynchronous replication.
In synchronous data replication, a write operation is not confirmed as complete until the remote volume has been updated.
In asynchronous data replication, a write operation is confirmed as complete before the remote volume is updated. Asynchronous data replication provides greater flexibility over long distances and low bandwidth.
Figure 4–4 shows point-in-time snapshot. Data from the master volume of each disk is copied to the shadow volume on the same disk. The point-in-time bitmap tracks differences between the master volume and the shadow volume. When data is copied to the shadow volume, the point-in-time bitmap is reset.
Figure 4–5 illustrates how remote mirror replication and point-in-time snapshot are used in this example configuration.