Help your customers reach data protection maturity
About 9% of businesses use active-active, continuous availability technologies
About 20% of businesses use replication as a primary component of their data protection strategy
This presentation discusses continuous availability and non-disruptive data mobility with EMC VPLEX and local and remote replication for operational and disaster recovery with EMC RecoverPoint.
In summary, there are a lot of data points. A few key points we’ve called out are:
64% consider data protection to be critical to their organization’s success, still 64% suffered downtime or data loss in last 12 months
More data protection vendors means more data loss and more spending on data protection
87% of businesses are behind the curve for data protection maturity and 71% of businesses are not fully confident in their ability to restore apps/data
The majority of businesses have suffered data loss in the last 12 months.
But, those businesses that are ‘ahead of the curve’ and have the most mature data protection strategies are the least likely to suffer incidents.
We also asked respondents to quantify the cost to their business of downtime.
The figures for downtime supported the same story.
This slide shows how that is played out technologically.
Just 9% have built their strategy on an active-active strategy, and the results show that they have fewer disruptions. 15% of these organizations experienced data loss with an active-active strategy.
In comparison…
Over 40% of businesses still rely on backup for their data protection. 31% of these organizations experienced data with a traditional backup strategy only. This means that just relying on backup means companies are 2x more likely to lose data than have a continuum of data protection.
EMC thinks of this as a data protection continuum that spans protection tiers to provide everything from continuous availability to replication to backup and archive. These tiers all need to work together in a complimentary fashion which is why EMC has brought together our availability, replication, backup and archive solutions under the Data Protection and Availability division. Today, we will be discussing the left-side of the spectrum, where RPO/RTO is zero for continuous availability and RPO/RTO is minutes/seconds for local and remote replication.
When considering Disaster Recovery planning for mission critical applications there are two key metrics that are typically used to determine recovery:
Recovery Point Objective (RPO); the measurement of data loss in time from before the disaster event when a recovery is executed. Effectively, RPO is the amount of data you are willing to lose in the event of a disaster. The more critical the data, the lower the RPO should be.
Recovery Time Objective: (RTO); The measurement of time it takes after the data has been recovered that it takes to restart the applications so that customers can resume production operations. Effectively, this is amount of production downtime that you can sustain after an event has occurred. The more critical the application, the lower the RTO should be.
As more critical applications are virtualized and as data centers move towards Public, Private and Hybrid Cloud environments, expectation for both RPO and RTO will be compressed. It is important for you to know that not all applications have the same recovery requirements and that a “one size fits all” approach to Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity no longer applies.
It’s easy to get started. No barriers to entry
It’s easy to get started. No barriers to entry
Putting all of that success together, we continue to bring in new customers at a fantastic pace.
VPLEX:
In 72% of the top 200 EMC enterprise accounts
Over 2000 customers
Over 5200 units deployed
Over 5-9s uptime
Over 68M run hours
Over 500 PB virtualized
RecoverPoint:
In 85% of the top 200 EMC enterprise accounts
Over 11,00 customers
Over 21,000 units deployed
Over 320M run hours
Over 1 EB protected
New strategies for Business Continuity include establishing Active-Active environments, either within the data center or across data centers.
EMC’s VPLEX storage virtualization platform allows you to create an Active-Active environment and deliver Continuous Availability.
Here’s an example of how VPLEX works:
We have two cluster server environments. Maybe one VMware HA cluster and the other Oracle RAC or IBM’s Purescale.
Each of these clusters connect to a single storage array, is a single location.
<Click> We introduce VPLEX into the environment and each of the volume are virtualized by VPLEX.
<Click> From this, VPLEX creates what are known as Distributed Virtual Volumes that go across arrays and store an exact copy of the volume in the other array. Each copy of data is fully read/write accessible by the Cluster Server and creates what is known as an Active-Active environment.
EMC VPLEX enables Active/Active distributed DCs.
VPLEX is a storage virtualization solution. There are many virtualization solutions in the market place today, however the key differentiator is that VPLEX was designed from day one to enable multi-site storage virtualization.
VPLEX is a hardware and software solution that can be used to create an abstraction layer between hosts and storage arrays. From a storage perspective VPLEX looks like a host and you can present Physical LUNs from the storage array to VPLEX. From a host perspective VPLEX looks like a storage array and you present virtual LUNs from VPLEX to the host. By breaking the link between the host and the physical storage array it enables storage virtualization use cases like non disruptive data mobility across array.
In the context of the conversation, it is possible to take another datacenter, with another physical storage array and a completely separate, resilient VPLEX cluster. The VPLEX Clusters can then be federated together. Federation is the process of creating a communication path between the VPLEX clusters. This can be done over FC or IP, however the RTT between the DCs must be lest than 5ms and there must be enough bandwidth to sustain synchronous replication. You do not need to merge fabrics between sites.
Once federated it is possible to create a distributed virtual volume. This of the distributed virtual volume a bit like a RAID 1 mirror, reads and writes can occur at both sites and VPLEX consistently mirrors the data across storage arrays. One advantage of this architecture is that it enables 100% storage availability. In the event of a problem with an array, there is not requirement to fail application from site A to site. Read and writes continue to be served from either VPLEX cache or the remote array.
The key consideration in regard to distributed virtual volumes is that they have exactly the same storage and LUN identifiers across both sites and are concurrently RW accessible. Why is that important..
With VPLEX the solution is simplified and additional availability is enabled.
With VPLEX Oracle RAC can be configured across sites with none of the normal complexity and the storage I/O from both nodes can be leveraged for a single set of LUNs.
Existing VPLEX and RecoverPoint products, offering continuous availability and operational and disaster recovery.
VPLEX
Active-Active
Transactions must be running and stable at two locations within Metro distances, mostly financial institutions
Provide Continuous Availability With VPLEX Array Mirroring
Mirror data from XtremIO to XtremIO to protect against the loss of an array or even an entire site.
Move Workloads To and From XtremIO Without Disruption
Application data can be stored on spinning disk and non-disruptively moved to XtremIO when performance requirements demand it
Expand X-bricks Without Disruption With VPLEX
Putting VPLEX between hosts and storage allows IT to add XtremIO capacity and performance by adding X-bricks without disrupting application data access
RecoverPoint
Remote replication with recovery to any point-in-time
Universal replication – any application, any distance, any array using VPLEX, any network
Supports bi-directional asynchronous replication over a Fibre Channel or IP network over any distance
Saves 90% of network bandwidth consumption thru Snap and Replicate capabilities, deduplication and compression
Ensures application-consistency
Enables application-level consistency and seamless re-starts between multiple arrays and multiple inter-dependent applications
Multiple configurations/sites
Fan-out capabilities for data distribution and dev/test environments
MetroPoint topology – industry-unique continuous availability with continuous disaster recovery with the ability to withstand a 2 site failure.
Field Proven
In 85% of the top 200 EMC enterprise accounts
Over 11,000 customers
Over 21,000 units deployed
Over 320M run hours
Over 1 EB protected
For customers requiring even further levels of availability, VPLEX Metro Express Edition can be used with RecoverPoint CRR to enable a third passive DR site in another out of region location.
There are two additional Use cases that without VPLEX would be hard to image.
Here’s an illustration of the time saved with VPLEX
EMC RecoverPoint offers the best in active – passive distributed datacenter design.
It is a appliance based replication solution that supports any application, any storage replicated between any locations with the ability to recover to any point in time.
vRPA enables a more affordable RecoverPoint solution and a solution that is less complex to deploy.
vRPA is only supported with EMC VNX.
It is policy based enabling you to take SLAs for different business applications and turn them into RPO and RTO objectives that are automatically managed by RecoverPoint.
For examples, I want my critical Oracle DB to be……. It will use Synchronous, Dynamic Synchronous or Asynchronous methods to best meet the SLA.
RecoverPoint uses in built deduplication and compression technologies to vastly reduce the amount of bandwidth required between sites. For many organizations it is the difference between note being able to replicate or having a DR solution.
This is single solution approach reduces cost, reduces complexity and reduces risk.
1st Click - show two text boxes Reduces…. & Saves…..
RecoverPoint 1:4 Fan-in and 4:1 fan-out feature
With continuous replication technologies, you can enhance your VMware environments and extend protection tools such as Site Recovery Manager to speed recovery times and minimize data loss.
EMC is proud to introduce the newest member of the EMC RecoverPoint family, RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, a simple, more efficient and proven operational and disaster recovery solution for the applications of today and tomorrow in VMware-based cloud environments. RecoverPoint for VMs is a fully virtualized, hypervisor-based replication and automated disaster recovery solution that is highly integrated into VMware’s cloud management software. This release provides local and remote replication in combination with continuous data protection for per-VM recovery to any point in time, with built-in automated disaster recovery orchestration. RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines brings the enterprise quality and advanced features of EMC RecoverPoint, with over 20,000 units installed worldwide, to a 100% software offering.
Since the I/O splitter resides within the vSphere hypervisor, RecoverPoint for VMs can replicate VMs to and from any storage array supported by VMware: SAN, NAS, DAS and vSAN.
EMC’s RecoverPoint for VM’s management framework was designed to be fully integrated into VMware’s vSphere Web Client. There is no separate management interface to learn how to use. vAdmins can: Discover, Configure, Monitor, Manage, Protect, and Orchestrate recovery.
The RecoverPoint product family is comprised of two different products targeted at two different audiences, solving different business problems.
RecoverPoint is targeted at the storage admin and protects storage LUNs, is managed thru EMC Unisphere (a storage-oriented interface), is deployed on physical hardware appliances, using embedded storage array splitters in VMAX, VNX, and VPLEX and supports over 50 storage systems, including EMC and 3rd party arrays using the VPLEX splitter.
We offer a more flexible deployment option for RecoverPoint, which removes the need for dedicated EMC hardware appliances. RP can be deployed as virtual appliances on existing ESXi servers, and uses the embedded array splitter in VNX. It only supports EMC VNX today.
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RecoverPoint for VMs is targeted at the VMware admin or vAdmin and protects at the VM level, is fully managed thru vCenter (common interface for vAdmins), is deployed as a virtual appliance on existing ESXi servers, has an embedded I/O splitter within the vSphere kernel, and is storage agnostic and supports any SAN, vSAN, NAS or DAS storage arrays certified by VMware’s HCL. RP4VMs is a completely separate product from RecoverPoint – there is no upgrade, no downgrade and no interoperability with the existing RP products.
RP4VMs leverages the field proven RP replication engine with over 20K units installed worldwide, 250 million run hours and over 1 EB of data protected and a world-class Global Services organization.
The ideal customer environment for RP4VMs is:
Highly virtualized with VMware
Want protection and recovery at VM-level granularity
Storage agnostic
Centralized management thru vCenter
Require zero or near zero RPO
Better WAN optimization
Better scalability
IT trusted and proven technology from EMC
RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines provides local and remote replication in combination with continuous data protection for per-VM recovery to any point in time. It supports both virtual disk types: VMDKs and RDMs. This diagram shows the architectural components and how RP4VMs works from the perspective of the primary user – the vAdmin.
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The architectural components include: a VMware vCenter plug-in, a RecoverPoint write-splitter embedded in the vSphere hypervisor, and virtual appliances, all comprehensively integrated in a VMware ESXi server environment. RecoverPoint for VMs uses a journal-based implementation to store all the changes made to the protected VMs. Local protection provides a DVR-like rollback in time capability to any point, even to the last I/O transaction or just seconds before the data corruption occurred.
Unique capabilities of RP4VMs:
1. RP4VMs deploys a more elegant and resilient virtual appliance – a sealed box, delivered as a VM. It is optimized and tested under fixed pre-configured conditions and runs its own operating system. HA and distributed management is built right into the virtual appliance cluster architecture and the complexities are transparent to the user. Unlike our competition, who exposes the user to SPOFs at the Virtual Replication Appliance (splitter and communication) and Replication Manager (config and journal databases) levels. The Replication Manager runs a Windows app inside a VM that requires a running Windows OS and is vulnerable to maintenance, patches, and viruses, which can impact accessibility to the journal for recovery to any point in time.
2. More flexible deployment options: vRPAs can be deployed regardless of where the replicated VMs reside. There is no requirement to tie vRPA location together with VMs needing to be replicated. They can reside on any ESXi node and even can be deployed together on a dedicated ESXi node for hosting vRPAs. The flexibility in how you are able to deploy the vRPA provides differentiating features which is unmatched in the industry for VM replication solutions. Typically other solutions require that you couple replicating appliances to the workloads and are limited by the performance of their virtual replication VM.
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3. Synchronous replication: EMC is the only vendor that offers remote protection over synch distances, from NYC to NJ. RP4VMs addresses the most demanding applications requiring zero RPO which none of our competitors provide today.
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4. Superior WAN optimization for asynch replication – our built-in WAN optimization consists of deduplication, compression and advanced bandwidth reduction algorithms that reduce WAN network consumption up to 90%. WAN optimization also ensures replication robustness with an improved resiliency for jittery networks with up to 300 ms latency and up to 5% packet loss.
RP4VMs is designed to be customer installable and upgradeable and customers can go from download to VM protection in about one hour. RP4VMs uses the existing VMware ESXi server environment and infrastructure. We support vSphere and vCenter Server Release 5.1 U1 and 5.5.
Let me briefly talk about deployment. We will start with the splitters. The splitters are small pieces of code that work on the virtual SCSI layer of ESXi, they are deployed using a standard vSphere Installation Bundle or VIB, and are required to be installed on each ESXi node in an HA/DRS cluster where protected VMs may reside. It is recommended that the splitter be installed on ALL ESXi servers in the environment to assure all VMs can be protected regardless of vMotion activity.
Secondly, and the main component of the solution are the virtual RecoverPoint Appliances. These virtual appliances provide for efficient journaling and tracking mechanisms to enable everything from CDP-like capabilities and dataflow management of all replicated VMs. The vRPAs are deployed by installing an OVF file and then leveraging a Deployment Manager Wizard for final configuration and tailoring to the specific details of the environment.
With all of the splitters and vRPAs deployed, all that is left to do is deploy the management component of the solution. Management in RecoverPoint for VMs is done entirely from within VMware’s vCenter Web UI. Deployment is done by installing a VMware vCenter plug-in on each vCenter server that participates in the replicated environment.
vAdministrators are taking a more active role in protecting and recovering VMs housing important workloads, since they understand the business value of the application data and the required data protection service levels when the VMs are created. One of the pain points typically found with LUN level disaster recovery solutions is that management paradigms typically are not optimized for cloud environments and when managing these solutions, there is a lot of coordination and effort required between vAdmins and storage administrators to assure that VMs are properly protected at all times in an environment where VMs are moving constantly to adjust for workload demands. Not to mention all of this management usually occurs within separate storage or disaster recovery interfaces rather than integrated into the Cloud Management Framework. This not only causes day-to-day complexity in tracking VM location for assured protection, but also requires additional training by vAdmins who are critical in the disaster recovery process.
EMC’s RecoverPoint for VM’s management framework was designed to be fully integrated into VMware’s vSphere Web Client. There is no separate management interface to learn how to use.
vAdmins can: Discover, Configure, Monitor, Manage, Protect, and Orchestrate recovery.
Automation is critical when providing VM data protection services. As I just mentioned, VMs are being created, moved, and deleted every business day. Discovering and keeping track of which VMs are protected, is a hassle and can be prone to errors with manual procedures. RecoverPoint for VMs maintains a constant watch over the live configuration of VMs created and where they are hosted, and is able to protect a VM even when that VM and it’s workload are vMotioned to a different compute resource, or its virtual disk is Storage vMotioned to a different datastore. More than that, it automatically adapts to VM configuration changes so that when you add a VMDK to the source, a copy is automatically added to the replica and immediately starts getting replicated.
The vAdmin can create protection policy templates that define classes of service in advance – which encapsulate parameters such as RPO, protection window and WAN optimization. Then when provisioning the VM protection, the vAdmin can use the existing templates for easy provisioning, or define a custom policy for maximum flexibility.
RecoverPoint for VMs automates all of the internal protection virtual disk structures and journals that are required to properly protect VMs based on the protection policies set. There is no need to dive into RecoverPoint databases and manually provision journals.
Finally, RecoverPoint for VMs also provides for integration with the vCenter databases to properly create and configure replica VMs either on the local or remote site. There is no need to manually create VM entries at the DR site just waiting for a failover to occur. These can be automatically provisioned and created in vCenter on the fly. This capability is really designed with DPaaS in mind, enabling the vAdmin to properly configure both sides of the replication at once, even if the secondary site is in a public cloud at a CSP.
Along with being integrated within the native vCenter management interface, RecoverPoint for VMs management workflow is also incredibly easy to use. Wizard-driven workflows, allow for minimal error through guided VM protection configuration.
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Here is an example of how easy and straight forward it is to apply a protection policy to a Virtual Machine leveraging RecoverPoint for VMs Protection Wizard:
First we specify if the VM should be added to an already existing Protection Consistency Group, <click> or do we want to create a new one with specific replication and protection SLAs.
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Then we will specify if we want a new target VM copy to be created automatically, or if we want to select an already existing target virtual machine. RP4VMs will automatically create the replica and the journal. The source disks, destination disks, and the journals reside on virtual disks, which can be placed on any storage that is supported by VMware. Next, we also define the replication link policy and determine whether we want to have synchronous or asynchronus replication and what RPO we would like to define. The protection policies can be configured to meet specific protection, performance and cost goals and eliminate or minimize data loss. RP4VMs can dynamically switch between sync and async based on the available bandwidth.
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For this walk through we will be creating a new target VM entry, so in this case, we simply specify which resource we would like that new target VM to be hosted from. This can be an individual ESXi Host, ESXi Cluster, or Defined Resource Pool in the environment.
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Finally we will specify the datastore the target VM should be hosted on. And it is as easy as that. No complex configuration files, or storage interfaces to click through. Just a simple wizard and your VM is protected.
With RecoverPoint for VMs, the vAdmin is able to conduct automated disaster recovery orchestration tasks from within the vCenter plug-in. Automated DR workflows include:
Recovery from logical corruption to any point
Failover and failback of specific consistency groups or CG sets to any point
Non-disruptive DR testing to any point
RecoverPoint for VMs allows the ultimate in flexibility for protecting applications by grouping VMs into Consistency Groups. Typically a consistency group represents a vApp, or a collection of VMs used by an application. RecoverPoint further offers an industry unique capability by supporting group sets: an additional layer of logical grouping, which provides consistency not only within an application but also across applications. For example, grouping a database server VM along with a web front end server VM that leverages that database. These Consistency Groups and CG group sets are the same elements used for orchestration.
Taking orchestration flexibility further, the ability to manage Enhanced Group Sets allows you to perform Protection and Recovery operations at any logical grouping required. Test, failover and failback whole VM collections - from a single VM up to a whole site at once - at a single click of the mouse. And, many of the DR tasks are automated, such as storage mounts and restarts of VMs in the prioritized order to ensure recoverability of the applications.
For the ultimate flexibility, RecoverPoint for VMs uniquely allows these Consistency Groups and CG Group sets to span not only multiple ESXi nodes but also multiple ESXi Clusters, and even protect VMs from ESXi nodes being managed by different vCenters! It is this logical flexibility that allows our users to tailor the solution to their run book practices and custom applications.
Users will be able to try a fully functional, no charge, no time limit RecoverPoint for VMs software license for non-production environments starting in early Q4 2014. Installation and administration and management support will be provided through our active Technical Community. Product documentation sets, Quick Start Guides, Installation Guides and How-to videos will all be provided for our users. The Technical Community will be used to support our Partner ecosystem. Our partners will have access to: step-by-step guides and documentation, downloadable SDKs, sample code, and apps in order to integrate RP4VMs into their environments, solutions and services. And, they have the ability to collaborate with EMC experts and other developers.
Overcoming the management concerns with ViPR Controller and enabling a Data Protection Services Catalog
ViPR Controller enables you to manage heterogeneous storage environments, including EMC, Non-EMC and commodity storage. In fact, any block storage supporting the OpenStack Cinder Driver can be managed by ViPR controller. But what makes ViPR controller unique, is that unlike previous implementations of storage virtualization, ViPR Controller decouples the control path from the data path.
By abstracting the control path, storage management operates at the virtual layer, which gives customers the ability to partition a storage pool into virtual storage arrays.
This is analogous to partitioning a server into a number of virtual machines. Control path data services provide multi-tenancy, service cataloging, metering and monitoring across all arrays.
ViPR Controller does not sit in the data path for file and block stores. This ensures applications can access storage and all its underlying value and data services embedded in the storage arrays—without performance degradation. It also enables administrators to centralize data provisioning and data management tasks, and allow applications to access file and block data. That’s storage virtualization without compromise.
Once the ViPR Controller is implemented, a host of services can be added with ViPR Services which can be layered over both traditional and new storage and enable hybrid data types - all at cloud scale. ViPR Services extract more value from your existing investments by shifting away from array-specific services to holistically meet SLAs, mixed workloads, and Big Data applications. ViPR Services offers:
The ECS object service provides the ability to store, access and manipulate unstructured data such as images, video, audio, and online documents as objects on file-based storage such as VNX, Isilon and NetApp storage systems without having to rewrite or rework existing file-based applications. The ECS object data service is a software layer that works transparently with different hardware platforms.
The ECS HDFS data service gives organizations the ability to run analytics using well known industry Hadoop distributions on existing data stored across heterogeneous systems such as VNX, Isilon and NetApp arrays.
The ECS Block service enables organizations to support any application, file system, database, operating system or virtualization platform with a unilateral block storage consumption model across ViPR Controller-managed arrays.
With ViPR Controller customers can begin to realize true cloud value – such as on-demand storage-as-a-service and higher-level data services with the addition of ViPR Services.
Everything can be delivered as a service with ViPR Controller – storage services based on performance, availability and protection.
So why should companies consider undertaking the journey to Continuous Availability? The reason is that even with great business continuity plans and disaster recovery programs in place, organizations know that should a site be lost, it often will take weeks to restore full service, if at all.
Continuous Availability offers organizations the opportunity to:
Merge HA & DR resources into one availability solution
Eliminate downtime for a multitude of scenarios, including site loss, storage loss, infra loss, unscheduled downtime and scheduled downtime
Eliminate most DR scenarios
Eliminate RTO & RPO
5X9s of Availability across 2-metro distance sites
Potentially reduce compute costs 40-60%
Splitting existing clusters between sites
Using fractional provisioning
Leveraging existing technologies
Reducing operational complexity
Minimizing idle assets and OS maintenance
Now we will get into more detail on VPLEX & RecoverPoint integration with ViPR Controller.
Later, the SAP Application owner is ready to move the application into production. In this case they want to retain a copy of the application in the test & dev environment. For production, they need greater performance, availability and protection for the expected workload.
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They have a profile for SAP production already defined in ViPR Controller as well. Notice that the performance, availability and protection is more aggressive in this profile.
The SAP application owner provisions the production volume by selecting the appropriate profile through the ViPR Controller provided service catalog…
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And ViPR Controller automates the provisioning tasks to allocate the resources in Connectrix and VMAX for the medium volume from the storage pool that matches those characteristics.
We now have a medium volume that delivers the performance we need.
Lets take a closer look at how we deliver on the other requirements in the profile…
For our SAP environment we happen to have VPLEX and VMAX in two sites so that continuous availability can be provided across the sites using a distributed virtual volume.
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The profile definition calls for a mirrored pair to protect the data in two sites. ViPR Controller automates the process of provisioning the storage, sending the various commands to VPLEX to provision appropriate storage from the VPLEX managed pool of storage. Then ViPR Controller instructs VPLEX to create mirrored pairs between the two sites creating a distributed virtual volume. This virtual volume will ensure that if one array or even an entire site fails, the application data will continue to be available through the distributed virtual volume.
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Here we show the example of an Exchange environment that needs a similar capability, but it’s profile is designed to use a VPLEX to deliver a distributed volume between VMAX and VNX. In this case, ViPR Controller profiles can be created to specify the appropriate storage based on the performance level required and VPLEX can create the appropriate volumes across the storage in its pool of managed storage.
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A profile could also be defined to have VPLEX deliver a distributed volume using 3rd party storage arrays. Again, ViPR Controller can create the profile specifying the appropriate level of service that equates to the storage managed by the VPLEX and VPLEX provisions and creates continuously available volumes based on the commands sent from ViPR Controller which are driven by the profile selected from the service catalogue.
Let’s take a look at another common use case for ViPR Controller and VPLEX – Automating a tech re-fresh.
Here we show a medium volume that had previously been provisioned from an older array which has reached it’s end of life.
When a new replacement system is installed…
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ViPR Controller discovers the new array and storage pools through VPLEX configuring all of the settings required to make that storage part of the VPLEX managed storage. ViPR Controller then adds the newly available storage pools to the ViPR Controller virtual pool so that it is available for provisioning.
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ViPR Controller then instructs VPLEX to provision a mirrored pair onto the new storage so that the data from the old storage is mirrored between both arrays. Once the array data is mirrored between arrays…
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ViPR Controller automatically cleans up the old array and make it ready to be removed form the data center. All that is left is to roll the old array to the loading dock.
Lets get back to our Exchange application.
Our profile defined in ViPR Controller calls for protection to be provided with continuous data protection, or CDP.
Within site 1 we have the application running on VMAX, but we also have RecoverPoint installed along with a VNX storage array.
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When this Exchange Profile definition was selected in ViPR Controller from the service catalog, ViPR Controller automated protection that is delivered by RecoverPoint for the disaster recovery and operational recovery defined in the profile.
ViPR Controller now automates provisioning of VPLEX Local and VPLEX Metro volumes protected by RecoverPoint with XtremIO as the back-end storage in 5 steps, an 81% reduction compared to manual steps.
ViPR Controller can now automate protection of customers’ most critical applications with VPLEX MetroPoint topology using VPLEX Metro continuous availability and RecoverPoint CDP for both metro sites and remote replication for the third DR site. VPLEX MetroPoint can be configured in 5 steps, a 91% reduction.
With ViPR Controller, customers can take crash consistent snapshots for a set of VPLEX volumes within a consistency group leveraging VMAX or VNX or array-based snapshot technology.
It also allows customers who have VMAX and VNX arrays behind VPLEX, to take continuous copies for VPLEX distributed volumes on one or both legs. This allows administrators to protect their application data from a single failure at either high availability site. They can also detach the mirrored copy and export it.
ViPR SRM enables IT to address the operational challenges of today's multivendor storage environments. It provides end-to-end visualization, analysis, and reporting for VPLEX environments. It also works with ViPR Controller to establish a solid foundation for bridging the gap between your current IT infrastructure and the 3rd platform. Together, these offerings provide you with the tools you need to abstract, pool and automate storage resources for delivering a more agile infrastructure with lower and for predictable costs.
ViPR SRM enables you to:
Understand application to storage dependencies by mapping topology and relationships from the host, through the switch, VPLEX, and down to the LUN on the array.
Troubleshoot performance problems, analyze performance trends, and create performance reports for key stakeholders.
Create application chargeback or show back reports to better align the cost of storage services with business requirements.
Analyze capacity consumption and performance trends to improve utilization and optimize resources
Monitor compliance with configuration best practices and the EMC support matrix to ensure the environment is always configured right to meet service levels.
Provide line of business stakeholders with reports that demonstrate SLA compliance.
Monitor compliance with data replication policies for EMC replication technologies to enhanced data protection
Analyze capacity consumption trends to improve capacity planning and purchasing processes.
ViPR SRM helps you visualize application to storage dependencies for performance analysis and troubleshooting, understand capacity usage and trends for planning, validate configurations to ensure compliance to service levels and automate reporting. With greater visibility and insight, you’re armed with the information needed to optimize your VPLEX environment to improve return on investment.
ViPR SRM also offers an extensible framework to support investments in ViPR Controller.
In short, the best thing about the EMC Hybrid Cloud solution is that it enables your business and IT teams to come together to provide not just legacy or traditional IT services, but to provide services that translate into real use case for your end users. Whether they are End user services, like the ability to request and provision VDI desktops, File Shares, or even to kick off more complex onboarding workflows…
…to business services…that generally support traditional business applications and systems in your datacenter…like requesting block or file storage, configuring backup and recovery services for your virtual servers, or just configuring new virtual servers to load applications onto…
…to more complex next-generation application services, like PaaS systems, scalable analytics, or even deploying complex applications
It’s these SERVICES that drive business. They don’t care about the wiring, they just want the light to come on when they hit the switch…
Underneath those services, are the enabling services that allow us to build and support them…these “Cloud Enabling Services” expose all of the “CLOUD” attributes that we’ve been talking about as why you need cloud…
What makes this possible?
Best of breed infrastructure from EMC and VMware that leverages the market leading integration that exists between both sets of technology.
Which creates a totally seamless experience, both the user – the consumer of the services your IT organization provides – and you – where you get to leverage all of your existing knowledge of EMC and VMware technology – so you don’t have to learn anything new.
It protects your existing investments in hardware and knowledge – and extends them to seamlessly leverage public cloud services – like vCloud Air and other EMC Cloud Service Providers – so you can do even more for your business.
What you get is a fully engineered, interoperable, seamless hybrid cloud running on technology you are already familiar with providing a very wide range of services and applications – all from a single self-service portal.
You also get choice in the hardware infrastructure – deploy quickly with Vblock or VSPEX – or roll with the network, server and EMC and VMware technology you prefer.
Optional Depth:
Specifically, what’s in the solution?
EMC & VMware Technologies Used:
VMware: vCloud Automation Center, vCenter Orchestrator, vCenter Operations Manager, ITBM Standard, LogInsight, NSX or vCNS, vSphere 5.5, vCHS.
EMC: ViPR Controller, Storage Analytics, Data Protection Advisor, Avamar, RecoverPoint, VPLEX with custom integration workflows for ViPR, Avamar & DPA
Built On Vblock, VSPEX for accelerated deployment, or the customer’s choice of EMC infrastructure
Converged infrastructure brings together compute, storage, I/O and management into an integrated platform for the fastest deployment and assured performance. Only EMC data protection and availability solutions – Avamar, Data Domain systems, RecoverPoint and VPLEX - are certified and integrated into Vblock and VSPEX to ensure optimal data protection and availability.
Key messages:
VPLEX Metro HA configs add two-nines to whatever availability would be provided by underlying storage infrastructure
For example, VPLEX Cluster Systems and VNX storage arrays have five-9's. With VPLEX Metro HA configurations, the customer will realize seven-9's availability for the entire storage infrastructure.
VPLEX Metro HA leverages two separate VPLEX clusters. Therefore, availability is the sum of the availability of the two independent clusters. Five-9's plus 5-9's equals ten-9's in theory. In practice, we are measuring seven-9's.
Worldwide, we have ~1750 VPLEX clusters configured as VPLEX Metro systems with VPLEX Witness enabled. (Note each VPLEX Metro system has two independent clusters). All told, these have over 22 Million cluster run hours.
Top ten things MCC did that we were too busy to tell you:
1,000,000+ run hours of SAP and Oracle workloads
1000+ Oracle users, and 40,000 Oracle transactions / minute
100+ years of simulated failures
16 months of continuous global operations
10 component, board, infrastructure, operational failures every week
4 enterprise scale applications hosted with HA & CA
3 times storage elements than average North America customer
So why should companies consider undertaking the journey to Continuous Availability? The reason is that even with great business continuity plans and disaster recovery programs in place, organizations know that should a site be lost, it often will take weeks to restore full service, if at all.
Continuous Availability offers organizations the opportunity to:
Merge HA & DR resources into one availability solution
Eliminate downtime for a multitude of scenarios, including site loss, storage loss, infra loss, unscheduled downtime and scheduled downtime
Eliminate most DR scenarios
Eliminate RTO & RPO
5X9s of Availability across 2-metro distance sites
Potentially reduce compute costs 40-60%
Splitting existing clusters between sites
Using fractional provisioning
Leveraging existing technologies
Reducing operational complexity
Minimizing idle assets and OS maintenance