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High Availability and Fault Tolerance

Simplyblock is designed to provide enterprise-grade high availability (HA) and fault tolerance for enterprise and cloud-native storage environments. Through a combination of distributed architecture and advanced data protection mechanisms, simplyblock ensures continuous data access, resilience against failures, and minimal service disruption. Fault tolerance is embedded at multiple levels of the system, from data redundancy to control plane and storage path resilience.

Fault Tolerance and High Availability Mechanisms

Simplyblock’s architecture provides robust fault tolerance and high availability by combining distributed erasure coding, multipath access with failover, and redundant management and storage planes. These capabilities ensure that Simplyblock storage clusters deliver the reliability and resiliency required for critical, high-demand workloads in modern distributed environments.

1. Distributed Erasure Coding

Simplyblock protects data using distributed erasure coding, which ensures that data is striped across multiple storage nodes along with parity fragments. This provides:

  • Redundancy: Data can be reconstructed even if one or more nodes fail, depending on the configured erasure coding scheme (such as 1+1, 1+2, 2+1, or 2+2).
  • Efficiency: Storage overhead is minimized compared to full replication while maintaining strong fault tolerance.
  • Automatic Rebuilds: In the event of node or disk failures, missing data is rebuilt automatically using parity information stored across the cluster.

2. Multipathing with Primary and Secondary Nodes

Simplyblock supports NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF) multipathing to provide path redundancy between clients and storage:

  • Primary and Secondary Paths: Each Logical Volume (LV) is accessible through both a primary node and one or more secondary nodes.
  • Automatic Failover: If the primary node becomes unavailable, traffic is automatically redirected to a secondary node with minimal disruption.
  • Load Balancing: Multipathing also distributes I/O across available paths to optimize performance and reliability.

3. Redundant Control Plane and Storage Plane

To ensure cluster-wide availability, Simplyblock operates with full redundancy in both its control plane and storage plane:

  • Control Plane (Management Nodes):

    • Deployed as a highly available set of management nodes, typically in a quorum-based configuration.
    • Responsible for cluster health, topology management, and coordination.
    • Remains operational even if one or more management nodes fail.

  • Storage Plane (Storage Nodes):

    • Storage services are distributed across multiple storage nodes.
    • Data and workloads are automatically rebalanced and protected in case of node or device failures.
    • Failures are handled transparently with automatic recovery processes.

Benefits of Simplyblock’s High Availability Design

  • No single point of failure across the control plane, storage plane, and data paths.
  • Seamless fail over and recovery from node, network, or disk failures.
  • Efficient use of storage capacity while ensuring redundancy through erasure coding.
  • Continuous operation during maintenance and upgrade procedures.