It is recognized that disks are an inherently unreliable component of computer systems. Mirroring is a technique to allow a system to automatically maintain multiple copies, or a dual backup of data so that in the event of a disk hardware failure a system can continue to process or quickly recover data. Mirroring may be done locally where it is specifically to cater for disk unreliability, or it may be done remotely where it forms part of a more sophisticated disaster recovery scheme, or it may be done both locally and remotely, especially for high availability systems. Normally data is mirrored onto physically identical drives, though the process can be applied to logical drives where the underlying physical format is hidden from the mirroring process. Typically, mirroring is provided in either hardware solutions such as disk arrays, or in software within the operating system. Additionally, file systems like Btrfs or ZFS provide integrated data mirroring. There are additional benefits from Btrfs and ZFS, which maintain both data and metadata integrity checksums, making themselves capable of detecting bad copies of blocks, and using mirrored data to pull up data from correct blocks. There are several scenarios for what happens when a disk fails. In a hot swap system, in the event of a disk failure, the system itself typically diagnoses a disk failure and signals a failure. Sophisticated systems may automatically activate a hot standby disk and use the remaining active disk to copy live data onto this disk. Alternatively, a new disk is installed and the data is copied to it. In less sophisticated systems, the system is operated on the remaining disk until a spare disk can be installed. The copying of data from one side of a mirror pair to another is called rebuilding or, less commonly, resilvering. Mirroring can be performed site to site either by rapid data links, for example fibre optic links, which over distances of 500 m or so can maintain adequate performance to support real-time mirroring. Longer distances or slower links maintain mirrors using an asynchronous copying system. For remote disaster recovery systems, this mirroring may not be done by integrated systems but simply by additional applications on primary and secondary machines.
Additional benefits
In addition to providing an additional copy of the data for the purpose of redundancy in case of hardware failure, disk mirroring can allow each disk to be accessed separately for reading purposes. Under certain circumstances, this can significantly improve performance as the system can choose for each read which disk can seek most quickly to the required data. This is especially significant where there are several tasks competing for data on the same disk, and thrashing can be reduced. This is an important consideration in hardware configurations that frequently access the data on the disk. In some implementations, the mirrored disk can be split off and used for data backup, allowing the first disk to remain active. However merging the two disks then may require a synchronization period if any write I/O activity has occurred to the mirrored disk.
Other schemes
Some mirroring schemes employ three disks, with two of the disks for the redundancy mirroring and the third to be split off for performing backups. In EMC nomenclature, these third disks are called business continuance volumes.
