Today’s businesses compete in a digital economy where downtime can be deadly. But keeping data highly available is never as simple as backing up one database to be an up-to-the-second copy of another. Instead, modern databases have to function in complex data environments that are spread across multiple geographies and accommodate a wide variety of data sources and modes of computing.
Because these databases handle massive amounts of business-critical data, it has become essential that they meet demanding requirements for high availability, high performance, and disaster recovery. Support for flexible topologies is also crucial because complex topologies can offer a high degree of data availability and resource utilization that enterprise-scale deployments require. To achieve these goals and ensure business continuity, enterprises now deploy multi-master databases across diverse geographies. Replication has become key to their effectiveness.
Let’s take a peek at how MongoDB (an early and leading NoSQL player) has fallen short in addressing these fundamental concerns with their replication technology. Some of MongoDB’s most prominent shortcomings are:
- Master-slave (intra-cluster replication) extension with single point of failure
- No true support for active-active configurations
- Inflexible topology
- Potential network interruption impacting availability during topology changes
- Complicated setup to maintain a quorum and elect primary for high availability
In contrast, Couchbase’s cross datacenter replication (XDCR) technology is a much more robust replication system. Couchbase provides peer-to-peer architecture, support for active-active configurations, independently scalable clusters, flexible topology, simplified administration, and filtered replication. Couchbase is also a highly performant solution with decentralized and parallelizable replication streams.
Several of our customers are using Couchbase for complex global deployments that take advantage of multi-master bidirectional ring topology where the clusters act as hot standby and also take on active traffic. To get a better feel for the elegance of Couchbase XDCR in action, you can read about these three real-world examples: Mirror Image, PayPal, Amadeus.
Want to learn even more about Couchbase and XDCR? Download this whitepaper and we’ll drill deeper into why XDCR is the most compelling solution for running your business-critical applications with zero downtime in geographically distributed locations.
