Asymmetric Active-Active Storage for Hyper-Converged Systems
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing solutions for active-active data access over distance are not economically or effectively scalable for large hyper-converged deployments and are susceptible to network outages, leading to inconsistent data between sites.
Innovation Solution
Designating a preferred site and a non-preferred site for each storage object, where write requests are processed by the preferred site and mirrored to the non-preferred site, ensuring the preferred site maintains the most recent data version, even during network outages, and allowing for flexible workload balancing and site designation changes.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If symmetric active-active data access is implemented across multiple sites, then data availability is improved, but network outages cause data inconsistency between sites
Solution Approach 1:
The patent designates one site as the primary site and other sites as secondary sites, creating an asymmetric architecture. The primary site has full read/write access to storage objects, while secondary sites have read-only access. This asymmetry resolves the contradiction by allowing the primary site to maintain authoritative data copies that remain consistent even during network outages, while secondary sites can still access data locally without causing inconsistency.
2Productivity
If available solutions for active-active data access are applied to large numbers of hyper-converged computing nodes, then data access capability is improved, but economic efficiency and scalability deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the storage system into primary storage components located at the primary site and secondary storage components located at secondary sites. This segmentation allows each site to independently manage its storage resources while maintaining coordinated access through the primary/secondary relationship. The segmentation enables scalable deployment across hyper-converged infrastructures by allowing independent expansion of primary and secondary storage capacities without requiring complex coordination between all nodes.
Data Source
AI summary
A technique for providing active-active access to data over distance includes designating a first geographical site as a preferred site and designating a second geographical site as a non-preferred site. In response to a computing node at either site encountering a write request to write data to a storage object shared across both sites, the write request is handled by the preferred site, where the specified data is written to local storage at the preferred site and mirrored to local storage at the non-preferred site.