88 HA Architectures & Capacity Planning with WebSphere Remote Server V6
5.1 Overview of Distributed Replicated Block Device
DRBD is a block device that is designed to build high availability clusters. This is
done by mirroring an entire block device through a dedicated network. You can
think of it as a network RAID-1 configuration. DRBD takes over the data, writes it
to the local disk, and sends it to a disk in another host.
The other component that is required along with DRBD for a high availability
solution is Tivoli System Automation, which detects the failure of one node and
brings up the DRBD on another. Use the DRBD to replicate application data for
applications such as WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere MQ, and DB2.
5.1.1 How DRBD ...