Aerospike Server v3.8, released on April 15, 2016, introduced significant changes to the way Cross Datacenter Replication (XDR) works. In prior versions, the XDR process that handles the replication to other Aerospike Clusters ran as a separate process. This led to operation complexity, but also some inefficiencies, since data had to be shipped between processes before the replication occurred.
To summarize the changes:
- XDR now runs in-process as part of the Aerospike Server Daemon (asd)
- Security can be enabled
- Pipelined record shipping dramatically improves performance
- Data shipping optimizations reduce local reads and duplicate records
- Statistics now track replication lag, etc.
The changes to XDR in version 3.8 are discussed in this blog post. We will have a future blog post on the performance gains we see with these changes. Differences, how to upgrade and other information can be found in our documentation.
If your company has XDR-enabled clusters, please contact Aerospike Support to review necessary changes to the XDR configuration.
Please note that XDR is only available in the Enterprise Edition (EE), the commercial edition of Aerospike’s database software; it is not available in the Community Edition. If you’re interested in a free trial of the Enterprise Edition, click here.