High Availability, Redundancy and Fault Tolerance

HAWQ ensures high availability for its clusters through system redundancy. HAWQ deployments utilize platform hardware redundancy, such as RAID for the master catalog, JBOD for segments and network redundancy for its interconnect layer. On the software level, HAWQ provides redundancy via master mirroring and dual cluster maintenance. In addition, HAWQ supports high availability NameNode configuration within HDFS.

To maintain cluster health, HAWQ uses a fault tolerance service based on heartbeats and on-demand probe protocols. It can identify newly added nodes dynamically and remove nodes from the cluster when it becomes unusable.

About High Availability

HAWQ employs several mechanisms for ensuring high availability. The foremost mechanisms are specific to HAWQ and include the following:

• Master mirroring. Clusters have a standby master in the event of failure of the primary master.
• Dual clusters. Administrators can create a secondary cluster and synchronizes its data with the primary cluster either through dual ETL or backup and restore mechanisms.

In addition to high availability managed on the HAWQ level, you can enable high availability in HDFS for HAWQ by implementing the high availability feature for NameNodes. See HAWQ Filespaces and High Availability Enabled HDFS.

About Segment Fault Tolerance

In HAWQ, the segments are stateless. This ensures faster recovery and better availability.

When a segment fails, the segment is removed from the resource pool. Queries are no longer dispatched to the segment. When the segment is operational again, the Fault Tolerance Service verifies its state and adds the segment back to the resource pool.

About Interconnect Redundancy

The interconnect refers to the inter-process communication between the segments and the network infrastructure on which this communication relies. You can achieve a highly available interconnect by deploying dual Gigabit Ethernet switches on your network and deploying redundant Gigabit connections to the HAWQ host (master and segment) servers.

In order to use multiple NICs in HAWQ, NIC bounding is required.