Wide-Area Forwarding Zone Types

A wide-area store with a scope set to zone is assigned to a defined zone type:

• Peer to Peer (Full Mesh)

• Hub-and-Spoke (2 Hops)

• Limited Hub-and-Spoke (1 Hop)

Peer to Peer (Full Mesh)

Messages flow directly between every pair of clusters in the zone in a single hop.

To scale:

• Add more clusters.

• Make multiple clusters appear as one. For example, a pool of clusters may all provide the same service with requests handled in round-robin, randomly, or another method.

This option features low latency (at the expense of network bandwidth and processing power in all persistence clusters). This zone type could result in best performance when adding persistence services to a cluster to expand client connection capacity.

Figure 54: Peer to Peer (Full Mesh)

Hub-and-Spoke Zone Type Commonalities

The following is true for the Hub-and-Spoke and Limited Hub-and-Spoke (One Hop) zone types:

• All communications must go through a hub. Spokes do not communicate directly to each other. Hubs can communicate to each other.

• Spoke clusters forward to the hub clusters, and the hub cluster forwards to all the spokes.

• One specific spoke only communicates to one specific hub.

• To scale, you can add hubs or spokes.

• Persistence services in the hub cluster use more resources than those in the spoke clusters.

• To scale, add hubs and/or spokes.

• Multiple hub machines can be made to look like a single hub through load balancing tools. This can make managing the spokes easier.

• Spokes can be used to partition the workload.

Hub-and-Spoke (2 Hops)

When using the Hub-and-Spoke zone type, a message from one spoke to another flows by way of the hub in two hops.

Figure 55: Hub-and-Spoke (2 Hops)

Limited Hub-and-Spoke (1 Hop)

When using the Hub-and-Spoke zone type, messages travel no farther than one hop, so a message cannot flow indirectly from spoke to spoke. Select this zone type to restrict the flow of information.

Figure 56: Limited Hub-and-Spoke (1 Hop)