[DRBD-user] do I really need heartbeat for DRBD?

Tomasz Chmielewski mangoo at wpkg.org
Mon Dec 17 18:48:27 CET 2007

Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.


Dominik Klein schrieb:
>> I just want to replicate a SAN (array, disk etc.) to another physical 
>> location.
> 
> Then you don't need heartbeat and drbd will do just fine.
> 
>> There is no sense in using heartbeat for me, as when that primary SAN 
>> dies, the asymmetric link from another datacenter will be too slow 
>> anyway to provide services.
> 
> Then you just want a data backup. Okay - drbd can do that for you. You 
> might want something that checks the device, connection and network 
> status, though.

No, it's not data backup. RAID-1 is essentially not backup ;)
Backup will be done somewhere else.

Let's say we have two datacenters and two SAN machines there. Data is 
written to and read only in datacenter_1; at the same time, everything 
is replicated to a SAN in datacenter_2.


It's some sort of assurance that when the datacenter_1 burns down to 
ground or gets flooded, it shouldn't take longer than a few hours to 
start all the services again in datacenter_2. It's much faster that way 
than having to restore the last backups from tapes, decompress, write 
where it belongs etc.



-- 
Tomasz Chmielewski
http://wpkg.org




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