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Dell PowerStore Protecting Your Data

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Metro protection

Metro provides bi-directional synchronous replication (active/active) across two PowerStore systems. A metro volume is exposed using two distinct systems, typically in two different data centers, up to 96 km (or 60 miles) apart, or in two distant locations within the same data center. The two systems cooperate to expose a single metro volume to application hosts by providing the same SCSI image and data, making the hosts and application running on them perceive two physical volumes that are hosted by the two systems as a single volume with multiple paths.

Metro protection enables increased availability and disaster avoidance, resource balancing across data centers and storage migration between two PowerStore systems.

When you configure a metro volume, the content of a metro volume is replicated to the remote system. Protection policies are used to configure additional protection such as local snapshots.

A metro session consists of two PowerStore systems. One system is configured as 'preferred' while the other is configured as 'nonpreferred'. These roles guide the system behavior on failure situations. When a failure occurs (either on one of the systems or to the connection between the systems), the metro session becomes 'fractured', and the nonpreferred system stops servicing I/Os.

The following table summarizes the allowed actions that you can perform on a metro volume depending on the current metro status and the system from which the action is initiated.

NOTE: The table addresses common use cases and does not include rare failure scenarios.
Table 1. Allowed Metro Actions
Location Metro Status Modify Role Promote Demote Pause Resume End Metro
On preferred system Operating Normally Yes No No Yes No Yes
Paused No No Yes No Yes Yes
Fractured No No Yes Yes No Yes
Switching to Metro Synchronization No No No Yes No Yes
On nonpreferred system Operating Normally Yes No No Yes No Yes
Paused No Yes (if other system is unreachable) No No Yes Yes
Fractured No Yes (if other system is unreachable) No Yes No Yes
Switching to Metro Synchronization No No No Yes No Yes

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