Rethinking database high availability with RDMA networks

Highly available database systems rely on data replication to tolerate machine failures. Both classes of existing replication algorithms, active-passive and active-active, were designed in a time when network was the dominant performance bottleneck. In essence, these techniques aim to minimize network communication between replicas at the cost of incurring more processing redundancy; a trade-off that suitably fitted the conventional wisdom of distributed database design. However, the emergence of next-generation networks with high throughput and low latency calls for revisiting these assumptions. In this paper, we first make the case that in modern RDMA-enabled networks, the bottleneck has shifted to CPUs, and therefore the existing network-optimized replication techniques are no longer optimal. We present Active-Memory Replication , a new high availability scheme that efficiently leverages RDMA to completely eliminate the processing redundancy in replication. Using Active-Memory, all replicas dedicate their processing power to executing new transactions, as opposed to performing redundant computation. Active-Memory maintains high availability and correctness in the presence of failures through an efficient RDMA-based undo-logging scheme. Our evaluation against active-passive and active-active schemes shows that Active-Memory is up to a factor of 2 faster than the second-best protocol on RDMA-based networks.