Hardware Failure

Even with the most reliable hardware, growing cluster and datacenter sizes will make frequent hardware failures a real threat to business continuity. In a cluster with 10,000 disks on 1,000 nodes, it is reasonable to expect a disk failure more than once a day and a node failure every few days.

Solution: Topology and replication factor

MapR automatically replicates data and places the copies on different nodes to safeguard against data loss in the event of hardware failure. By default, MapR assumes that all nodes are in a single rack. You can provide MapR with information about the rack locations of all nodes by setting topology paths. MapR interprets each topology path as a separate rack, and attempts to replicate data onto different racks to provide continuity in case of a power failure affecting an entire rack. These replicas are maintained, copied, and made available seamlessly without user intervention.

The following section provides instructions for setting up topology and replication using the MapR Control System: