What Is Active-Active Clustering

What Is Active-active Clustering?

Active-active clustering is a data resiliency architecture in which client workloads are distributed across two or more nodes in a cluster to keep your data safe and available in the event of an unexpected component failure.

The Benefits of Active-active Clusters

Common benefits of active-active clusters include:

• High availability of mission-critical apps across data centers, campuses, and metros
• Load balancing across a cluster of servers
• Data redundancy and resiliency (maintain uptime even when one site fails)

Why Active-active vs. Active-passive?

When it comes to high-availability (HA) clusters, the two main configurations you’ll encounter in data storage are:

• Active-active clusters: Client machines connect to a load balancer that distributes their workloads across multiple active servers.
• Active-passive clusters: Client machines connect to the main server, which handles the full workload, while a backup server remains on standby, only activating in the event of a failure.

The key difference between these two architectures is performance. Active-active clusters give you access to the resources of all your servers during normal operation. In an active-passive cluster, the backup server only sees action during failover.

Why Choose Pure for Your Active-active Cluster?

Purity ActiveCluster™ is a multi-site active-active stretch cluster that comes with Pure Storage® all-flash arrays. It allows you to achieve new levels of availability across your data center, metro region, or globally, with the simplicity of the Purity operating environment.

Key perks of using ActiveCluster include:

• All the benefits of a true active-active cluster running on an all-flash array
• Elimination of the need for third sites and gateways with Pure1® Cloud Mediator
• Zero recovery point objective (RPO) and zero recovery time objective (RTO)
• Live migration of application workloads between flash arrays
• Automatic resync of servers using dedupe-aware async upon restoration of a failed connection

Purity ActiveCluster is also radically simple to configure. With one new command and the following four short steps, you can whip up a stretched active-active cluster in minutes:

1. Connect the arrays
2. Create a stretched pod
3. Create a volume
4. Connect hosts

With ActiveCluster, failures and recovery are now transparent across your environment, array, data center, or network.