Advice on SAN replication / SRM

My manager has a goal (its nice actually) " SAN replication and integration with SRM"

I have 2 sites each with a CX3-80, a Cisco MDS Fabric switch and the VM guys have LOTS of attached LUNs (combined total at 2 sites is 90TB and rising rapidly..). We have dark fibre between sites but currently no Fabric connectivity. CWDM comes with the Cisco Nexus in a month or so..

My company likes spending the least amount of money (of course)

Me, the poor SAN Admin only works 4 days a week.

I need something that is reliable, relatively easy to maintain, stable and cost effective!!

So far I am considering Mirrorview / S or A, Recoverpoint or "something else"

I've been trawling powerlink trying to find some information on the real operational overhead of MirrorView, LUN overhead, SP performance etc etc, with no real luck.

Im also interested in how to connect MirrorView - Ive only seen reference to FCIP, can I use Inter VSAN routing on the MDS (oh damn another license to buy) or join the fabrics and stretch the VSANs across the fibre.

All the SRM doco Ive seen indicates we would need SnapView as well - is this correct?

Recoverpoint seems to be nice, then I dont have to join the fabrics, and I can connect it into the front end ports of CX3-80s, so not much different to dedicating a port for mirrorview. What operational/performance overheads eg diskspace, SP performance etc occur with RP?

Any suggestions appreciated.

TIA

Responses(1)

A

Anonymous

5 Practitioner

•

274.2K Posts

0

March 15th, 2010 08:00

Steph,

By far, Recoverpoint is the most flexible option. If your FC storage platform needs change, say you move from a CX to a DMX, etc. and if you are leveraging Recoverpoint, you effectively are decoupling the dependency on a array-based replication technology. Thus it's a more "open" solution that scales into the 100s of TBs and beyond.

That being said, all of the EMC array-based products, such as MirrorView for CLARiiON, Celerra Replicator, and Symmetrix SRDF support a variety of RPOs and have been supported replication solutions since VMware's SRM launched in 2008. So these technologies work perfectly well and are supported with SRM, just as RecoverPoint is supported. EMC has also spent a lot of time integrating the technologies mentioned with SRM worldwide and with each of these we have augmented the functionality with vCenter plugins to support SRM failback.

On your question re: Snapview, yes if you plan to leverage MirrorView, you will require Snapview as a part of the SRM solution, as it's used in the test failover mode process, when executing the test plan, SRM automates/orchestrates a "snapshot" copy of the running datastore, it leverages the array's native snaphot technology to do so. In the case of RecoverPoint, it leverages something called a "bookmark" which is a point-in-time snapshot if you will. It's automatically attached/mounted, the VMFS re-signituring is handled automatically during the process, and the destination host in the SRM plan has read/write access to the bookmark/snapshot. Any changes created within this bookmark/snapshot are stored within. That means it will not impact/affect your production data. To coin a popular phase -- "what happens in test, stays in test"...

On connectivity choices with RecoverPoint and use with VMware/SRM, you can leverage the CLARiiON splitter option or the fabric-based approach, which allows the SNA fabric to intelligently split writes to the target and the RPA simultaneously, this is a great option when you are leveraging hetrogenous FC storage options from EMC or a 3rd party supported FC storage platform, of which there are many.

To see a list of the latest and greatest features for RecoverPoint, take a look here:

http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/white-papers/h2781-emc-recoverpoint-3-new-features.pdf

Lastly, I encourage you to contact your local sales/technical team from EMC or an EMC partner of your choice to dig deeper into your objectives and architecture goals. It's sounds like a great project and EMC would love to assist you in achiving your desired data protection/disaster recovery goal!

Stephen Spellicy

Technical Marketing Manager, Sr. vSpecialist

VCE Alliance

Follow me on Twitter: @spellicy

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