Currently, we are using the standard Solace deployment setup where the primary and standby appliances are hosted within the same data center, and a separate DR primary and DR standby pair are hosted in another data center for DR replication.
However, our business is now exploring a different architecture where each appliance would be located in separate data centers. For example:
Primary appliance in one data center
Standby appliance in another data center (same region or different region)
Similarly, the DR setup would also follow the same approach.
We would like to understand whether Solace supports this type of deployment architecture and if there are any recommended best practices or considerations for implementing it.
Any guidance or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Good question — let me walk through how HA and DR work in Solace and how they complement each other.
High Availability (HA) provides redundancy within a single datacenter. Two appliances are deployed as a primary/backup pair, connected by a high-speed optical fibre link. If the primary goes down, the backup takes over with no data loss. Because of that fibre requirement, both appliances must be physically co-located — you can’t stretch an HA pair across datacenters.
Disaster Recovery (DR) covers the cross-datacenter scenario. If an entire primary datacenter goes down, DR allows applications to fail over to a secondary site. The DR appliances sit in that separate datacenter.
To have both, you’d deploy two appliances in HA configuration at your primary datacenter, and another two appliances in HA configuration at your DR datacenter. Each HA pair acts as the other’s DR mate — giving you full redundancy at both the appliance level and the site level.
If you’re considering placing a single standalone appliance in each datacenter, that approach leaves you exposed to data loss. Without HA within each site, a single appliance failure means lost messages with no backup to take over.