Itzikr's Blog

Hi,

One of the EMC products that is really close to my heart is RecoverPoint, i don’t know if it’s to do with the fact it gets developed here and i’m often getting consulted with in terms of Roadmaps and VMware Integration or maybe it’s just the fact that i was doing so many BC/DR based projects that i have learned to appreciate the simplicity of the product and the amazing value it offers, anyway..

EMC RecoverPoint product family, has done very well for EMC, and more importantly, it’s done very well for our customers who have implemented RecoverPoint to protect their mission critical data.

Historically, RecoverPoint has been know as a powerful replication technology with differentiated capabilities.

With the latest release of RecoverPoint 4.0 which will be announced on April 30th, EMC is enabling this technology to be accessible to a much wider audience.

RecoverPoint has built a solid reputation in the market for data protection and disaster recovery with over 10,000 global units shipped, approaching an Exabyte of data protected and recently surpassed 100 million run hours. Clearly a field-proven product.

RecoverPoint protects any application residing on any array and provides DVR-like, any point-in-time recovery for continuous protection. The RecoverPoint family protects organizations from data loss due to common problems such as server failures, data corruption, viruses, and end-user errors, while also protecting against catastrophic events that can bring an entire data center to a standstill.

RecoverPoint is a networked-based replication technology, which frees it from being tied to one specific array. It’s focus is on Block data that run over a SAN.

It is ideal for companies that desire granular, point-in-time recovery; need to minimize their WAN bandwidth utilized for replication; or require the ability to replicate between one or more VMAX, VPLEX, VNX series or non-EMC arrays.

This slide illustrates the cost savings of bandwidth compression. In this example, RecoverPoint reduces the bandwidth required to replicate changes to the data by up to 90 percent, resulting in a consumption between 3.6 and 7.2 Mb/s, so the replicated data can flow across a fractional T3 network. If you use a different technology that does not achieve this level of compression, the replicated data must flow across a DS3 network, which costs more than three times as much as the fractional T3 and leaves 10 percent unused.

RecoverPoint manages the bandwidth by utilizing five technologies:

1.Change Deltas: RecoverPoint sends the changes, not the entire data set. If your write-to-read ratio is 1:5 each day, then only 20 percent of your data set will change each day. It is this 20 percent that will be replicated by RecoverPoint and subject to the rest of the bandwidth management technologies.

2.Prioritization: In the event that RecoverPoint detects bandwidth congestion it will prioritize the replication of the changes by a per-consistency group priority. This will ensure that the most critical replication jobs get the bulk of the resources, including bandwidth resources.

3.Write-Folding: The larger the RPO for the replicated data, the higher the probability that a subsequent track supersedes an earlier one. This write-folding is a key foundation of reducing the amount of data RecoverPoint has to transmit.

4.Deduplication: Block-level deduplication is accomplished by using technology from the EMC Avamar deduplication algorithm. This is where all duplicated copies of data are identified and reduced to one instance.

Compression: Block-level compression is accomplished by using multiple algorithms that are controlled by a per-consistency group setting. RecoverPoint uses a lossless algorithm that guarantees that what is compressed can be de-compressed without any data loss. RecoverPoint uses a dictionary approach to build a dictionary of redundant data. The RecoverPoint compression works regardless of the data type. The larger the RPO for the consistency group, the higher the probability that redundant data will be discovered and the higher the level of compression. An RPO of zero will only compress the data in one 512-byte block, while an RPO of greater than zero will be able to compress data across multiple blocks

RecoverPoint is also tightly integrated with VMware. With version 4.0, we are extending this integration, which I’ll talk about in just a minute.

Tier 1 enterprise customers can choose RecoverPoint for both local operational recovery and remote replication.

RecoverPoint 4.0 is a huge step forward, with a number of new and important capabilities packed into the 4.0 release that I’d like to share with you here.

First and foremost, we’re bringing affordable tier-1 data protection to the Midrange with the introduction of the virtual RecoverPoint Appliance (vRPA) option for VNX.

The vRPA can reduce the total solution cost for VNX customers by up-to 60%. With a RecoverPoint license any number of vRPAs can be ordered to scale your environment for no additional charge!

When to use vRPA? When Physical?

Use vRPA for low-end VNX workloads, with RecoverPoint/SE

One vRPA tested to sustain up to  –8500 IOPs, 80 MB/s throughput(*):

Performance is linear in the number of vRPAs

EMC’s planning tools – for fine-tuned results

(*) 8 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM. Other configurations can have different results. Detailed numbers – in the RecoverPoint documentation

A new multi-site feature allows both FAN IN (4:1) replication for protecting remote or branch offices and FAN OUT (1:4) to replicate critical data up-to 4 sites.

Another addition targeted at the mid-tier is the ability for RecoverPoint to now replicate synchronously over IP – eliminating the requirement for a fibre link between data centers and lower the operational costs for our customers.

With this new release, RecoverPoint is the ONLY replication solution that can recover to ANY point-in-time with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). Without RecoverPoint, SRM will only allow you to access data at the last point in time, which may not be suitable in a recovery scenario where that last point in time could be corrupted, or in a situation were the customer wants an earlier copy of the data for Dev/Test or other purposes. Access to ANY point in time is what RecoverPoint does best, and now via Site Recovery Manager.

The new RecoverPoint is also more powerful – offering higher scale and capacity:

•7x more data protected (up to 2PB)

•4x number of protected volumes to over 8000 per cluster (16K LUNS shared pool e.g. 8K production and 8K copy) ,

•Asynchronous throughput has expanded by over 60% to 400 MB/second
– 400 MB/s Async is the new performance number per CG (Distributed CG, to be precise). A cluster can replicate much more, of course. This is meant for your very large databases, which has lots of traffic and still require consistency.

With these improvements, customers can now protect more critical applications with their RecoverPoint environments.

Finally, RecoverPoint is now easier to manage for all customers, large and small. A new Unisphere for RecoverPoint graphical user interface makes it easier to protect more data with less effort. It also offer a REST API for those customers who want to integrate RecoverPoint into an existing management framework, or create custom reports.

RecoverPoint now offers a choice to ensure the best value for a customer’s business and application environment.

Customers can still choose a physical RecoverPoint appliance (RPA) shown on the lift for maximum performance and multi-site configurations.

For small sites or less-demanding environments, customers can choose a software-only virtual RPA (vRPA) option for VNX shown on the right for a lower total cost of ownership.

RecoverPoint 4.0 extends its reach to new customers requiring multi-site replication solutions.

Fan-In

Replicate data from a number of different remote-offices to a center location

Fan-Out

Better protect data by replicating data to several remote locations

Here’s Comes Johnny…

RecoverPoint integrates with vCenter Server to allow the RecoverPoint administrator to quickly view virtual machines fully protected by RecoverPoint, and to see which of the virtual machine’s LUNs/data stores are not protected.

Additionally, RecoverPoint is integrated with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) to simplify and automate disaster recovery failover and failback in VMware Infrastructure. Let’s look here at an example.

Replication shown between production and replication volumes

production volume fails.

SRM restarts VMs on replication site.

to choose any-point-in-time selection

SRM users are no longer limited to recover from LAST image. With RecoverPoint they can recover from ANY point in time. No other solution offers this level of flexibility integrated with VMware SRM.

RecoverPoint also has proven scale to protect 1000s of VMs

And with RecoverPoint consistency groups, the data and associated log files are kept in sync – even across arrays.

attached below is a demo walking you trough the Point In Time (PIT) feature, please note that while RP 4.0 is GA now, the PIT component relies on EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) 5.5 which will be released shortly after EMC World.

I’m also attaching a video showing how EASY it is to deploy the vRPA

The Story behind the story:

VMworld 2011, Tyler B, Alex T and yours truly were doing the EMC booth duty, somehow we all spot Efri N who is one of the RP PM’s,

we started rolling out the importance of SRM PIT, how cool will it be for customers to select the specific PIT for recovery for scenarios such as logical corruption, Virus infections etc`..I’m SO happy to finally see this come trough!

..One More Thing

If you think this is cool, you have seen NOTHING yet!, i strongly encourage you to vote for the following VMworld Session, trust me, it will blow your mind.

5276 Next Generation ‘Economical’ Data Protection for Business-Critical Applications