While the PostgreSQL database is renowned for its robustness, reliability and emphasis on ensuring the safety and consistency of data, there are times when factors such as hardware and software failure, administration mishaps and disaster scenarios need to be correctly managed. This may require that a database replication solution be put in place to guard against known and unknown database issues.
The FSP team has spent many years working with clients on the implementation of High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions that stand up to the requirements of always-on, 24/7 operation.
From SAN-level replication to asynchronous multi-site disaster recovery solutions, the FSP team can work with clients to advise on and customise HA/DR solutions to suit their specialised business requirements.
Some of the solutions supported by FSP include:
SAN-based replication solutions
The FSP team can architect and assist with HA/DR solutions which utilise shared storage on a SAN and clustering software such as RedHat Cluster Suite to provide high performance, hot standby master-slave database replication with zero downtime.
For disaster recovery, options such as off-site SAN replication are also available.
Continuent uni/cluster for PostgreSQL
Continuent provides a synchronous multi-master replication solution to ensure that your database is always available and online, in all circumstances. All aspects of the Continuent solution are redundant and there are no single points of failure (SPOFs) anywhere in the system. In addition to allowing writes to any node in a cluster, Continuent also allows the load balancing of reads to ensure the utmost in performance for your database users.
Warm Standby with PITR (Point In Time Recovery)
Starting from version 8.2, PostgreSQL now has the ability to provide a high availability cluster configuration by shipping transaction logs asynchronously to a number of slave servers. These slaves servers constantly apply the stream of transaction logs to ensure that they are up-to-date with the master database.
In addition to providing short time-to-recovery, PITR also provides the ability to roll back the database to a "point in time" in case of disaster or administrative error.
Slony-I PostgreSQL Replication
Slony-I is an asynchronous master-slave replication system which allows clients to maintain read-only almost-real-time replicas of their databases at a multitude of locations. Slony-I is an open source project which has received great support from the PostgreSQL community, and is the leading open source replication solution for PostgreSQL. Slony-I is under active development, powers large systems such as the .org registry, and is the perfect tool to use when looking to implement off-site, WAN-based HA/DR systems.
More Information
If you'd like more information about FSP HA/DR solutions, or have a special replication requirement, please don't hesitate to contact us.
