Chapter 9. High Availability

   

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The increasing amount of data storage is accompanied by a growing need not only to protect the data, but also to make it highly available round the clock. This means that we must protect data from corruption, while simultaneously avoiding high performance penalties. RAID (redundant array of independent disks) is one way to achieve this balance of high availability and high performance. The first part of this chapter provides an overview of RAID.

To ensure high availability and quick disaster recovery, data is stored in multiple locations and continuously updated to reflect changes. This is the idea behind the mirroring and replication schemes developed in general and for the Windows Server family of operating systems in particular.

There can be no single point of failure in the path from the server to the data storage device. This is the basic idea behind the multipath solutions. Multipath solutions developed for the Windows Server family of operating systems are described in Section 9.3.

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