One of my favorite products in EMC was just GA’d with a new version and now support XtremIO, a double party!, now lets speak about replica management challenges:

Replica Management Challenges

Maintaining System Availability.

Minimize Data Loss and Downtime.

Maximize SLA Performance.

Storage Efficiency.

Fastest Recovery Using Smallest Storage Footprint.

Agile Development.

.Rapidly Deploy Refreshed Environments Without Compromising on Time and Quality

Self-Service.

.Application Admins need to manage recovery and repurposing

ok but how replica managements is related to EMC Appsync ?

at it’s core, EMC Appsync give you a very simplified way to mange you replicas

AppSync is Simple to Install: AppSync is simple with EMC Unisphere-like interface and can centrally push and upgrade its agents to application servers.

AppSync is Simple to Manage: AppSync has an intuitive SLA-driven management interface that provides real-time RPO protection status information.

AppSync is Simple to Order: AppSync is now part of the EMC VNX Application Protection Suite and is part of the Total Protection and Total Efficiency Packs. You may already have the ability to use this product, all it takes is a zero dollar sales order with your EMC Sales rep to make it official.

The product is SLA driven and you can receive alerts when SLAs are not being met.

In this example, our Exchange Bronze (local copy plan) is doing fine as indicated by our green status in the AppSync dashboard.

But VMware and SQL aren’t doing so well because it looks like something may be wrong with the remote link.

AppSync will provide a dashboard status based on the status of the copy, and can also send an alert to the email recipients.

With EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI), admins can…

•Configure protection

•Run service plans

•Mount datastores

•Restore files

All within vCenter!

In version 2.1, EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) 6.4 must be used for AppSync Management within vCenter. this is awesome because it allows you, the vSphere administrator to manage Appsync directly from the GUI, the “portal” you are comfortable with which is the vCenter web  interface

here’s another screenshot from the vCenter web interface

what’s the “magic sauce” between Appsync to XtremIO, well, it’s the unique way we implement snapshots on XtremIO ( http://volumes.blog/2014/05/12/xtremio-redefining-snapshots/)

this version of Appsync (2.1) will focus on backing up VMware vSphere datastores and Oracle / MS SQL DB’s (virtual of physical)

the operation recovery is fairly trivial, based on the three pre-defined SLA’s, you can select a local copy or a remote one or a combination of both, again, using the super easy GUI, for DB’s protection, we also embed the XtremIO VSS provider for Appsync which is needed for an application consistent based backup (MS SQL DB’s use case)

the other use case which is more applicable for the DB’s world and boy, I had so many conversations with customers about it, is the ability to “refresh” your test / dev environment, the workflow will allow you (for example) to take a copy of your production DB and refresh your test /dev copies with the one you just took, note that this version of AppSync 2.1) And XtremIO (3.0) support the mounting of the new DB’s but will not support refreshing the DB(s) itself, this feature will come at a later version

downloading and taking it up for a spin is super easy, just go to the url above and test it for 30 days, im SURE you are going to love it!

below you can see a demo I recorded that shows it all, enjoy.