When a failure occurs, suspension of GAD pairs by consistency group guarantees data consistency among primary volumes if the I/O mode of a primary volume changes to Block, or among secondary volumes if the I/O mode of a secondary volume changes to Block.
If some GAD pairs in a consistency group are suspended due to a failure, all GAD pairs in the consistency group to which the suspended GAD pairs are registered change to the suspended state. This is called concurrent suspension.
However, if a GAD pair in COPY status is suspended by a failure, only that GAD pair is suspended. In this case, other GAD pairs in the consistency group are not suspended (concurrent suspension is not executed). This is because the data in the secondary volume of a GAD pair in COPY status is inconsistent, so data consistency is not guaranteed among secondary volumes in the consistency group even if concurrent suspension is executed.
- The volumes that have the most recent data are aggregated to a single storage system.
If a failure occurs in some pairs, and all GAD pairs registered to a consistency group are in the Suspended state, the volumes that have the most recent data are aggregated to the storage system at either the primary site or the secondary site.
- Data consistency is guaranteed before and after the suspension of the
GAD pairs.
If all GAD pairs registered to a consistency group are in the Suspended state, only the volumes (of either the primary or the secondary site) that have the most recent data will receive I/O from the server. The volumes of the other site will stop receiving I/O from the server (including I/O for volumes where no failure occurred). In addition, processing to write data will also stop. This ensures data consistency before and after the GAD pair suspension in the volumes that stopped receiving I/O from the server.
For example, a server issues write operations A to D. After the storage system receives write operation B, all GAD pairs registered to the consistency group change to the Suspended state because of an LDEV failure in the primary volume. In such a case, write operations A and B received before the GAD pairs changed to the Suspended state were completed for both the primary and secondary volume. Write operations C and D received after the GAD pairs changed to the Suspended state were completed only for the secondary volume.
Therefore, the volumes that have the most recent data are aggregated to the storage system at the secondary site.
For details about storage system support (firmware) for consistency groups, see Requirements and restrictions.