Scenario: Disaster Recovery

A severe natural disaster can cripple an entire datacenter, leading to permanent data loss unless a disaster plan is in place.

Solution: Mirroring to another cluster

MapR makes it easy to protect against loss of an entire datacenter by mirroring entire volumes to a different datacenter. A mirror is a full read-only copy of a volume that can be synced on a schedule to provide point-in-time recovery for critical data. If the volumes on the original cluster contain a large amount of data, you can store them on physical media using the volume dump create command and transport them to the mirror cluster. Otherwise, you can simply create mirror volumes that point to the volumes on the original cluster and copy the data over the network.

The mirroring operation conserves bandwidth by transmitting only the deltas between the source and the mirror, and by compressing the data over the wire. In addition, MapR uses checksums and a latency-tolerant protocol to ensure success even on high-latency WANs. You can set up a cascade of mirrors to replicate data over a distance. For instance, you can mirror data from New York to London, then use lower-cost links to replicate the data from London to Paris and Rome.

The following sections provide instructions for setting up mirroring and recovering volumes from mirrors: