An Analysis of Replication Enhancement for a High Availability Cluster

In this paper, we analyze a technique for building a high-availability (HA) cluster system. We propose what we have termed the 'Selective Replication Manager (SRM),' which improves the throughput performance and reduces the latency of disk devices by means of a Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRBD), which is integrated in the recent Linux Kernel (version 2.6.33 or higher) and that still provides HA and failover capabilities. The proposed technique can be applied to any disk replication and database system with little customization and with a reasonably low performance overhead. We demonstrate that this approach using SRM increases the disk replication speed and reduces latency by 17% and 7%, respectively, as compared to the existing DRBD solution. This approach represents a good effort to increase HA with a minimum amount of risk and cost in terms of commodity hardware.