StarWind VSAN is the hyperconverged solution by StarWind that was further improved with the introduction of the Journal Synchronization feature.
This new capability provides two important improvements:
- Best performance
- Fast recovery
In a typical StarWind VSAN deployment, the storage availability (HA) is ensured by the synchronous replication mechanism between the configured nodes making applications and services available 24/7/365 even in the event of a node failure.
If a large capacity storage is deployed at the organization, it's clear the synchronization of a large amount of data can take a long time and a failure may cause the unavailability of some applications and services. This can be unacceptable by the business and a fast recovery strategy become the priority for the administrators. Here is where the Journal Synchronization comes into play.
Synchronous replication
In a typical vSAN deployment, synchronous replication mechanism is used to ensure that data is available in all nodes member of a specific cluster at the same time. The scope is assuring the storage redundancy to guarantee the maximum data availability in case one node experiences a failure.
It may happen that during the synchronization especially with a large amount of data, a hardware or a software failure may affect the process with the result of having the replicated storage out of sync. In the worst situation, the storage itself can go offline. It's clear that the scenario where all nodes are not synchronized or offline, applications and services may fail (picture from StarWind).
In addition, also the storage performance is affected because the synchronization process introduces an additional workload to the subsystem.
StarWind vSAN Journal Synchronization
The Journal Synchronization is the StarWind solution introduced in the recent update of VSAN that allows to minimize the risk of downtime. To minimize the time required for the synchronization, synchronization journals are stored on separate storage and sync only changes written to the storage while one of the partners was out of sync.
This solution allows out of sync nodes to become available in minutes limiting the risk of service disruption maximizing the applications availability. The use of the Journal Synchronization process has a minimum impact on storage performance since nodes don't need to synchronize data which was already written on every node in the cluster (picture from StarWind).
The new Journal Synchronization feature in the StarWind VSAN solution improves not only the storage performance but ensure fast recovery in case of problems occurred during the replication. Applications and services uptime are maximized bringing a big benefit to the business.
StarWind VSAN is available to download as 30-days trial.
