In geographically dispersed active-passive clustering configurations, the active and passive nodes within a single cluster are separated geographically from each other. The passive node might have its own local data copy that tracks the production copy by some form of replication over the connecting wide area network.
Active-passive geographically dispersed servers should be reserved for a disaster recovery configuration, where data replication and the difficulties that are introduced by wide area networking cannot be avoided.
In geographically dispersed active-active clustering configurations, each cluster serves the processing needs of the users that are local to the geographic site that contains that cluster. Users in each site can access objects and content that is located in any site within a FileNet® P8 domain. With request forwarding, document creation and search requests can be serviced by a site that is geographically closest to the object store database. With content caching, frequently accessed documents whose content is located in a different site can be cached at the local site for faster retrieval. With server communication, all documents in an advanced storage area can be maintained in multiple replicas at different sites for data redundancy and faster access.