An Implementation of Storage-Based Synchronous Remote Mirroring for SANs

Remote mirroring ensures that all data written to a primary storage device are also written to a remote secondary storage device to support disaster recoverability. In this study, we designed and implemented a storage-based synchronous remote mirroring for SAN-attached storage nodes. Taking advantage of the high bandwidth and long-distance linking ability of dedicated fiber connections, this approach provides a consistent and up-to-date copy in a remote location to meet the demand for disaster recovery. This system has no host or application overhead, and it is also independent of the actual storage unit. In addition, we present a disk failover solution. The performance results indicate that the bandwidth of the storage node with mirroring under a heavy load was 98.67% of the bandwidth without mirroring, which was only a slight performance loss. This means that our synchronous remote mirroring has little impact on the host’s average response time and the actual bandwidth of the storage node.