I'm still somewhat new to HBase and I'm trying to understand possibilities for region server failover. If I have a region server that goes down, it looks like I won't have any access to that region's data until a backup server comes online. I read that I can reduce the zookeeper timeout to minimize that time down, but in a system that is meant to be highly available, it seems like this could be cause for concern since a portion of the data will be entirely inaccessible.
Is there a way to have a secondary read-only region server that becomes the new primary region server in the event of a failure? This way that data will always be accessible unless all of the region server backups fail? Or are there other ways to replicate region data to avoid loss of access for possibly several minutes to that data if the server goes down? Thanks, Jeff
