In the data era, information needs to be always available. This is reflected worldwide by regulations requiring synchronous data mirroring to prevent outages and critical data loss. Most institutions now require a business continuity plan in addition to a disaster recovery plan for IT that provides “continuous availability” to keep business application data intact and current after a site or data center outage. In addition, few companies today can sustain 24-hour data center operations, so many IT business continuity plans now require automatically initiated site failover in case of an outage to further reduce the possibility of critical data loss.
Introducing Dell EMC PowerStore metro node
With that in mind, Dell Technologies is introducing Dell EMC metro node, purpose built to address these business continuity challenges. Unlike some industry active-passive solutions, metro node provides true active-active metro configurations by allowing simultaneous writes at both sites and supports Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recover Time Objective (RTO) equal to zero. Zero RPO means there’s an expectation for zero data loss. Zero RTO means the time to recover is zero time or immediately. In addition, PowerStore metro node is designed to automatically initiate an instant site failover through its unique virtual machine (VM) witness technology.
Why is metro replication important to business continuity?
Only metro synchronous replication, which includes fully mirrored storage systems with an active-active configuration, can provide RPO and RTO equal to zero. You can implement PowerStore metro node with the full confidence that your data will always be available and accessible within metro Round Trip Time (RTT) boundaries of less than 10 milliseconds.
“The PowerStore metro node was fully capable of synchronizing our workloads across two separate PowerStore arrays while delivering superior performance,” said Bryan Peroutka, Technical Solutions Architect at World Wide Technology. “It features a very quick, responsive and easy to navigate interface and it’s very space efficient, only adding an additional 2U to our PowerStore footprint. It’s an ideal addition to any company’s business continuity strategy.”
Key benefits of metro node
Volume/LUN level granularity
Allows the replication of specific LUNs for application level granularity, significantly reducing TCO and improving flexibility by giving you the choice of which workloads to replicate.
Non-disruptive addition of consistency groups
Supports consistency group add/delete operations without disruption. This provides operational flexibility with zero downtime and means you can add or remove volumes to consistency groups without breaking the replication.
Multi-Platform Support
Enables replication between different Dell EMC array types.
Avoid degradation to array performance
Metro node replication has zero performance impact on the storage array.
No additional host software
It’s self-contained and does not require any software to be deployed on the hosts or a host reboot.
Provides multiple capabilities and configurations
In addition to synchronous metro replication, PowerStore metro node can also support local configurations for continuous application availability, data mobility to non-disruptively relocate workloads and enables storage technology refresh without application downtime.
Compact form factor with high performance
The PowerStore metro node cluster is comprised of two 1U units which support 32Gb/s Fibre Channel.
Learn more about the PowerStore family of all-flash data storage appliances.
