Business Continuity with the
Concerto™ 7000 All Flash Array
Layers of Protection for Here, Near and Anywhere Data Availability
Version 1.0
Abstract
Concerto 7000 All Flash Array’s Continuous Data Protection (CDP) is an all-‐flash-‐array based solution that provides
comprehensive data protection functions such as mirroring, snapshots, journaling, remote replication, and automated disaster
Table of Contents
1.
DATA PROTECTION ... 3
2.
PROTECTION FOR HERE ... 4
2.1. Mirroring ... 4
2.2. Backups ... 4
2.2.1 Application Consistent Snapshots ... 4
2.2.2. Virtual Server Protection ... 4
3.
PROTECTION FOR NEAR ... 5
3.1. Stretch Clusters for Metro Protection ... 5
3.2. Near-‐zero RTO – the Key to Business Availability ... 5
4.
PROTECTION FOR ANYWHERE ... 6
4.1. WAN-‐Optimized Replication ... 6
4.2. DR Automation for Fast, Simple Recovery ... 6
5.
SUMMARY ... 7
Business IT operations grow in size and complexity, while budgets shrink or remain stagnant. Mixed IT assets such as servers, operating systems, applications, networking, and storage require data to always be available regardless of the environment. Managing complex IT configurations affects the reliability and confidence of recoverability, further straining already ‘stressed’ organizations.
Concerto 7000 eliminates issues of complexity and reliability for business continuity. Concerto continuous data protection (CDP) approaches data protection from the unique perspective of both application and service availability, resulting in comprehensive and automated recovery for all critical applications, business data, and services. Concerto CDP enables organizations to define, meet, and even exceed IT SLAs, while protecting data in a way that supports application and organizational goals.
Concerto CDP offers technical innovation centered on delivering tangible business benefits with resilient operations and cost-‐ effective IT services. This all-‐inclusive, all-‐flash array based solution enables business application protection and data assurance for even the most demanding environments. Concerto CDP provides application-‐specific data protection for applications including Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and others, along with near-‐instant recovery, remote replication, and disaster recovery automation.
As data volumes grow, demands on the supporting infrastructure place increased strain on equipment and staff budgets. Concerto CDP supports growing data volumes, supporting LUN sizes of up to 64TB. An advanced multi-‐threaded architecture enables fast, simultaneous operations such as replication, compression, and encryption.
Figure 1-‐1. Concerto 7000 for Here, Near and Anywhere Protection
2.
Protection for Here
2.1. Mirroring
Concerto synchronous mirroring provides block-‐level data mirroring across Concerto 7000s over a Fibre Channel SAN. Data synchronizes to a second storage device independent of the servers involved with just a few mouse clicks. There is no need for system-‐specific host-‐based tools.
Once the mirror is online, all future data is written simultaneously to both the primary volume and the mirror. Built-‐in, tunable mirror monitoring continually checks for lag time in the write speed between sides of the mirror, which could reside on two separate devices. If lag times are too large, the mirroring process will automatically suspend to minimize the impact to the production server. The mirror will then re-‐synchronize as soon as possible without impacting server performance.
2.2. Backups
Concerto CDP eliminates the disruptive nature of traditional backup operations. Concerto CDP provides backup on secondary storage volumes that need not be all-‐flash arrays; offering as many as 1,000 snapshots per LUN. This eliminates any loading or disruption to production applications and volumes. Concerto backup connects to all major backup systems for your operational efficiency.
Centralized backup can be performed off of secondary Concerto CDP snapshot volumes. This out-‐of-‐band configuration isolates all backup-‐related loads from physical or virtual production servers. Concerto automatically mounts snapshots from Concerto CDP to a backup server in order to backup data to your physical tape or virtual tape library. Because backup occurs directly from the secondary storage, critical production applications are not impacted.
2.2.1. Application Consistent Snapshots
Critical and valuable data is most often derived from a particular business application, such as a database, ERP, CRM, or financial/accounting system. Without application awareness, protection and recovery of these data volumes can be crash-‐ consistent but not application consistent, resulting in data loss or corruption. Concerto CDP provides application-‐aware snapshot agents for most popular business applications. Up to 1,000 snapshots are available per protection volume, for the most flexible and comprehensive up-‐to-‐the-‐moment recovery points.
Snapshots can be instantly mounted in an application-‐consistent state for recovery of individual files and database objects, or for entire volumes. Concerto CDP offers up to 1,000 snapshots per volume, enabling true flash-‐to-‐disk or flash-‐to-‐flash backup. Intelligent snapshot scheduling and retention policies provide instant backup functionality covering weeks or months’ worth of data. Larger environments can simplify multiple snapshot operations by leveraging a consistency group feature, which allows multiple data protection operations to be performed simultaneously.
2.2.2. Virtual Server Protection
3. Protection for Near
3.1. Stretch Clusters for Metro Protection
Primary storage cannot fail. Therefore, HA is a firm requirement. When deployed in clusters, Concerto 7000 offers HA
functionality. A special communication link between Concerto nodes continuously synchronizes I/O and metadata between the pair of Concerto 7000s over an Ethernet link. The HA pair tolerates node failures or temporary upgrades with minimal, if any, disruption to primary storage volumes. Combining the benefit of HA and disaster recovery, the stretch cluster functionality allows you to deploy a HA solution between two geographically separated sites. In case of failure on one site, data is immediately available at the other site without change, as the data sets are constantly synchronized.
Figure 3-‐1. Concerto Stretch Clusters
3.2. Near-zero RTO – the Key to Business Availability
Recovery of email, files, database objects, or entire servers is the essential objective of any data protection strategy. Concerto CDP delivers comprehensive local and remote data recovery, with fast and straightforward access to recovery data. The
4. Protection for Anywhere
4.1. WAN-Optimized Replication
As organizations grow organically or via merger or acquisition activities, they often accumulate disparate networking resources and can have facilities in several different locations. In addition, monthly bandwidth costs increase significantly with each higher telecommunication link (T1, T3, OC3, OC12, and others). Concerto CDP enables efficient and robust replication between data centers, leveraging sophisticated data link technologies to make the most of expensive inter-‐location connections. To minimize bandwidth requirements, Concerto CDP provides WAN-‐optimized replication with compression and deduplication for improved bandwidth efficiency and data encryption (in-‐flight) to guard against unauthorized disclosure.
Concerto technology minimizes the amount of data transmitted by eliminating redundancy at the application and file system layers. Rather than arbitrarily transmitting entire blocks or pages (as is typical of other replication solutions), Concerto
technology maps, identifies, and transmits only unique blocks, reducing network traffic and bandwidth requirements by as much as 95%. Meanwhile, adaptive replication automatically switches between continuous and periodic data transmission in the event of temporary bandwidth link outage or throughput degradation. Periodic replication queues data for subsequent transmission, while preserving write-‐order fidelity.
Figure 4-‐1. Concerto Remote Replication
4.2. DR Automation for Fast, Simple Recovery
dependencies such as ‘order of start,’ which ensure proper resumption of business operations at the remote site.
5.
Summary
Concerto brings recovery and backup to all-‐flash arrays with sophistication and performance that enables enterprises to employ the right solution for their business needs. The ability to replicate and backup data from a high performance all-‐flash array, such as the Concerto 7000, means that the overall speed and efficiency of your cloud or data center are preserved. With Concerto you get protection for Here, Near and Anywhere events to keep your data safe.
For more information go to www.violin-‐memory.com
Table 5.1. Concerto 7000 Feature Summary
Concerto Data Services:
Broad Classification Features Sub-‐Features Value Proposition
Performance 500K IOPS fully loaded Transformative performance
Protocols Protocols FC, ISCSI Block Common SAN protocols
Multipathing Support Enables Multipathing
Support for host OS Windows FC, AIX, Linux High Performance, Load Balance, Resiliency
Data Protection
Services Features Sub-‐Features Value Proposition Enterprise Data Protection Solutions Supports All/Complete Enterprise Ranges/Configurations
RPO 0 to Hours Zero Data Loss
RTO 0 to Hours App recovery
Snap Shots
Read Data Protection Services, Analytics etc
Write Test and Dev. Apps
Crash Consistent Backup/Business Continuance
App Consistent Enable reduced RTO
Consistency Groups Atomic Snap across
multiple LUNs Enables app consistent snapshots/rapid app recovery
Continuous Data Protection
RPO (0 to hours) Enables Any Point Recovery, surgical recovery of
production data from any point, compliance analytics without impacting production data, data warehouse seeding, at the end of period (month, quarter etc), a point in time reproduction of data for archiving, compliance or analytics.
Enables App Consistent Snapshots
Host agents for app consistent
MSSQL, MS Exchange, Oracle, MySQL, VMWare, DB2
Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Replication Asynchronous (app consistent)
Local, Metro, Over WAN Continuous Data
Replication
Journal based replication with app consistency Intelligent Adaptive Replication Schedule Replication
Efficiency
Patented WAN Optimized
Better use of bandwidth
Compression Better use of bandwidth
Bandwidth Throttling Better use of bandwidth
Stretch Metro
Cluster Sync Mirroring Stretch Metro Cluster Enables DR with 0 RPO and 0 RTO
Tie Breaker Server Image
Enables sync replication monitoring/management
LUN Mirroring Enables availability
across array failure
Protects against array failures Ecosystem
Integration Plug-‐in
SRM Integration DR Tests without any disruption. Integrated DR
management in VM environs Automated App
Disaster Recovery Automated App Disaster Recovery Host management agent for app recovery in case site failures (DR)
Enabling Integration to Backup Environment
Backup Application Integration through AutoMount
Seamless integration of V7000 into customer backup environment in ALL OS server
environments
Windows, Linux, VMware with most backup applications
CheckSnap CheckSnap Verifying snap integrity For maintenance and support verifying snapshot integrity
Storage Efficiency,
Virtualization, Scale up Features Sub-‐Features Value Proposition Thin Provisioning Thin Enables Storage
Efficiency Don't waste unused capacity
Clone
Clone Thin Clones Test, Dev., Analytics
Thick Clones Analytics/Data transformation on demand
Storage Virtualization Abstracted LUN provisioning & LUN expansion
Add capacity to LUNs as needed provision LUN independent of physical HW
Scale Up Non-‐Disruptive Capacity Pooling Across Arrays
Expand to include capacity from other Violin arrays (6.5 TB to 280TB)
VAAI Support Optimized deployment
in VM Environment (Faster VM clone, VM migration, etc.)
ESX enabler for increased productivity
VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Support
Automated DR for VM deployment
Recovery productivity
Microsoft Support SMI-‐S plug-‐ins Windows 2012 SMI-‐S plug-‐in for System Center
Snapshot Director with Agents
Coordinated intelligent snapshot management of apps in VM's for local backup and DR
Snapshot management productivity
Management SW Features Sub-‐Features Value Proposition
Plug-‐ins for data center Management tools
SRM, SnapShot Director, SMI-‐S
Snapshot management productivity
Snapshot Director Snapshot management productivity
Plug-‐ins for
Applications DR app agents MSSQL, MS Exchange, Oracle,
MySQL, VMware, DB2
Operations productivity
Plug-‐ins for Backup
Management AutoMount for Windows, Linux,
VMWare with most backup application
Keep existing backup procedures for reduced management costs
Data Security Features Sub-‐Features Value Proposition
Replication Encryption for Data-‐in-‐Flight
Protects against packet sniffing
Data Encryption for Data-‐at-‐Rest
