Swarm can protect the disk by creating multiple copies of each object on different nodes called replicas. Control how many replicas are created for each object and how quickly they are created after the object is initially stored in the cluster.

How Replication Affects Risk

By default, each object in Swarm is stored with two replicas, with each replica residing on a different node in the cluster. Replicas are distributed across subclusters if a cluster is configured to use subclusters.

In the event of a total failure or a hard drive fails for any reason, the cluster reacts quickly and initiates a volume recovery process for each missing drive. The recovery process rapidly creates additional replicas elsewhere in the cluster of all objects stored on the now missing drive(s) so each object again has two replicas. There is a protection risk for the sole replica of the object in the cluster if a second drive fails before the recovery process is completed.

There can also be a potential period of vulnerability at the moment an object is first stored on Swarm if Replicate On Write option to create multiple simultaneous replicas is not used.

Controlling Replication Protection

A rapid sequence of drives to fail is possible, but unlikely. The solution is to change the replication requirements if this presents an unacceptable risk for an application. Changing the default replication requirements to a greater number of replicas allows a trade of disk space savings for added security. 

To set the replication protection for the cluster, configure a single setting, policy.replicas, with three required parameters, for min, max, and default number of replicas: 

See Implementing Replication Policy .

Increasing Replication Priority

By default, Swarm writes a new object to one node, responds to the application with a success code and UUID (or name), and then quickly replicates the object as needed to other nodes or subclusters. The replication step is performed as a lower priority task.

While this creates the best balance of throughput and fault tolerance in most circumstances, there are cases where you may want to provide the replication task the same priority as reads and writes, which guarantees replication occurs quickly even under heavy sustained loads.

The cluster administrator can add the following parameter to the node or cluster configuration file:

With replication set to priority 1, object replication is interleaved in parallel with other operations. This may have a negative impact on cluster throughput for use cases involving sustained, heavy writes. With health.replicationPriority = 1, it is still possible (though much less likely) that the failure of a node or volume can cause some recently written objects to be lost if the failure occurs immediately after a write operation but before replication to another node can be completed.

Enforcing Replicate On Write (ROW)

Another replication strategy to protect content is Replicate on Write (ROW).

Without ROW, the client writes a single copy and depends on the Health Processor (HP) to create the necessary replicas. Relying on HP leaves open a small window for data loss: the volume containing the node holding the sole copy can fail before HP completes replication. ROW eliminates the window by guaranteeing all replicas are written on the initial request.

How it works: The ROW feature requires Swarm to create replicas in parallel before it returns a success response to the client. ROW protection applies to WRITE, UPDATE, COPY, and APPEND requests. The secondary access node (SAN) sets up connections to the number of available peers required to create the needed replicas when ROW is enabled.

See Configuring ROW Replicate On Write.