Mirroring for Nonstop Recovery

In some systems, the master device, user databases, and transaction log are all stored on different partitions of the same physical device and are all mirrored to a second physical device.

This configuration provides nonstop recovery from hardware failure. Working copies of the master and user databases and log on the primary disk are all mirrored, and failure of either disk does not interrupt SAP ASE users.

Disk mirroring for Rapid Recovery
Graphic showing two disk devices, with the second containing a mirror of the master device, user databases, and the transaction log of the first disk.

With this configuration, all data is written twice, once to the primary disk and once to the mirror. Applications that involve many writes may be slower with disk mirroring than without mirroring.

This figure illustrates another configuration with a high level of redundancy. In this configuration, all three database devices are mirrored, but the configuration uses four disks instead of two. This configuration speeds performance during write transactions because the database transaction log is stored on a different device from the user databases, and the system can access both with less disk head travel.

Disk Mirroring: Keeping Transaction Logs on a Separate Disk
Graphic showing two disk devices and their mirrores. One of the mirrored devices containes the mirror image of the master device and the transaction logs, and the second mirrored device contains a mirror image of the user databases.