About data protection
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About data protection

Membership arbitration by itself is inadequate for complete data protection because it assumes that all systems will either participate in the arbitration or are already down.

Rare situations can arise which must also be protected against. Some examples are:

• A system hang causes the kernel to stop processing for a period of time.
• The system resources were so busy that the heartbeat signal was not sent.
• A break and resume function is supported by the hardware and executed. Dropping the system to a system controller level with a break command can result in the heartbeat signal timeout.

In these types of situations, the systems are not actually down, and may return to the cluster after cluster membership has been recalculated. This could result in data corruption as a system could potentially write to disk before it determines it should no longer be in the cluster.

Combining membership arbitration with data protection of the shared storage eliminates all of the above possibilities for data corruption.

Data protection fences off (removes access to) the shared data storage from any system that is not a current and verified member of the cluster. Access is blocked by the use of SCSI-3 persistent reservations.

SCSI-3 Persistent Reservation

SCSI-3 Persistent Reservation (SCSI-3 PR) supports device access from multiple systems, or from multiple paths from a single system. At the same time it blocks access to the device from other systems, or other paths.

VCS logic determines when to online a service group on a particular system. If the service group contains a disk group, the disk group is imported as part of the service group being brought online. When using SCSI-3 PR, importing the disk group puts registration and reservation on the data disks. Only the system that has imported the storage with SCSI-3 reservation can write to the shared storage. This prevents a system that did not participate in membership arbitration from corrupting the shared storage.

SCSI-3 PR ensures persistent reservations across SCSI bus resets.

Note   Use of SCSI 3 PR protects against all elements in the IT environment that might be trying to write illegally to storage, not only VCS related elements.

Membership arbitration combined with data protection is termed I/O fencing.