Itzikr's Blog

Remote Protection Challenge

Lets talk about remote replication challenges, traditionally, you would need different tools in order to protect different applications and /or arrays, how do you replicate to more than one site? How can you achieve applications consistency and lastly, how can you utilize your WAN link in the best possible way?

XTREMIO native replication With RecoverPoint

Think about the following question:

Im so happy to announce the native integration of XtremIO with RecoverPoint!, this is not your traditional grandfather replication solution, why do we need it,

How can you take the array storage controllers that are so busy serving primary IO’s and now hammer them with replication as well? Well, you don’t!, you really need to offload that task to an entity that can scale-out for replication purposes as well!, think about it this way, you don’t fly abroad every time you want to send a package, however, you DO prepare the package and “offload” it to UPS/ Fedex etc’, this is EXACTLY how this replication will work, we didn’t just utlizie the existing RecoverPoint technology, our goal was to make it better and as someone who have tested this quite heavily, here’s how it work:

1. An host that is connected to XtremIO is issuing an write request (that was defined as part of a replicated Consistency Group), because of the CG, the array (XtremIO) will issue a snapshot for that volume, the snapshot interval will be explained later on)

2. RecoverPoint will then deliver this snapshot to a remote RecoverPoint Appliance (RPA) or RPA’s (scale out for specific volumes as well!), that will then deliver it to the remote array, the remote array can be XtremIO of course BUT it can be ANY array that RecoverPoint support (heterogeneous support, we don’t lock you in to buy XtremIO at the remote site as well)

The remote array will receive the IO from the RPA based on the technology it support, if its XtremIO, it will be a snapshot, if it’s a VNX/VMAX, it can be either a splitter or a snapshot

3. RecoverPoint will continue sending these XtremIO based snapshots to the remote site until the replication is finished

4. Our first replication is done, great!, now let’s assume our RPO is 60 seconds, so RP will ask the array for the diff SCSI (deltas between what it sent to what it has), this is where the beauty of utilizing the amazing XtremIO snapshot technology kicks in, for us, snapshots are jut like any other volume, we dedupe and compress them globally!

5.. so in our case, we send the Diff answer to the RPA’s which will then build the bitmap of changes and store them in their “journals”, this is why in this integration, the RP journal can be very small, it doesn’t store anything but metadata, this is a radical shift from the traditional splitter based RecoverPoint where it used the journal to actually store the Diffs of the data as well, remember, we let each “entity” do what they do best, we (XtremIO) create and store the snapshots, RecoverPoint send and store the journal, scale out for primary IO’s and scale out for replication!

5. The snapshots are then deliver to the remote site, and stored as snapshots, this process will of course return based on the RPS’s so lets dive to these as well:

In this version of RecoverPoint/XtremIO integration we have two best of breed RPO’s

· Periodic – sets the minimum time between cycles, the minimum is 60 seconds, the maximum is 1 day.

· Continuous – no wait time, provides the best RPO in the market (for all flash array), guaranteed 60 Seconds!

lastly, management of the entire solution is so easy, below you can see the entire workflow, this is a long video I made that’s shows many of the “advanced” parameters, one of things I like about the RecoverPoint solution is that it has an “easy” and advanced’ buttons, an entire replication can be configured in 10 seconds and on the other hand, you can go in an push knobs to your liking as well, I really cant wait for customers to start using it!