Check out the new USENIX Web site.

Home About USENIX Events Membership Publications Students
FAST 2002 Abstract

SnapMirror®: File System Based Asynchronous Mirroring for Disaster Recovery

Hugo Patterson, Stephen Manley, Mike Federwisch, Dave Hitz, Steve Kleiman, Shane Owara, Network Appliance Inc.

Abstract

Computerized data has become critical to the survival of an enterprise. Companies must have a strategy for recovering their data should a disaster such as a fire destroy the primary data center. Current mechanisms offer data managers a stark choice: rely on affordable tape but risk the loss of a full day of data and face many hours or even days to recover, or have the benefits of a fully synchronized on-line remote mirror, but pay steep costs in both write latency and network bandwidth to maintain the mirror. In this paper, we argue that asynchronous mirroring, in which batches of updates are periodically sent to the remote mirror, can let data managers find a balance between these extremes. First, by eliminating the write latency issue, asynchrony greatly reduces the performance cost of a remote mirror. Second, by storing up batches of writes, asynchronous mirroring can avoid sending deleted or overwritten data and thereby reduce network bandwidth requirements. Data managers can tune the update frequency to trade network bandwidth against the potential loss of more data. We present Snap-Mirror, an asynchronous mirroring technology that leverages file system snapshots to ensure the consistency of the remote mirror and optimize data transfer. We use traces of production filers to show that even updating an asynchronous mirror every 15 minutes can reduce data transferred by 30% to 80%. We find that exploiting file system knowledge of deletions is critical to achieving any reduction for no-overwrite file systems such as WAFL and LFS. Experiments on a running system show that using file system metadata can reduce the time to identify changed blocks from minutes to seconds compared to purely logical approaches. Finally, we show that using SnapMirror to update every 30 minutes increases the response time of a heavily loaded system only 22%. dollars depending on the size of the enterprise and the role of the data. With increasing frequency, companies are instituting disaster recovery plans to ensure appropriate data availability in the event of a catastrophic failure or disaster that destroys a site (e.g. flood, fire, or earthquake). It is relatively easy to provide redundant server and storage hardware to protect against the loss of physical resources. Without the data, however, the redundant hardware is of little use.
  • View the full text of this paper in PDF. Until January 2003, you will need your USENIX membership identification in order to access the full papers.
    The Proceedings are published as a collective work, © 2002 by the USENIX Association. All Rights Reserved. Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for the noncommercial reproduction of the complete work for educational or research purposes. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks within this paper.

  • If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.

  • To become a USENIX Member, please see our Membership Information.

?Need help? Use our Contacts page.

Last changed: 27 Dec. 2001 ml
Technical Program
FAST 2002 Home
USENIX home