Low cost, simple disaster recovery using XP and remote external storage
Hi folks,
HP is a leader when it comes to providing customers with fault tolerant Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions. We demonstrated that leadership last year when we literally destroyed an entire data center to show how five different O/Ss connected to the XP disk array failed over flawlessly to a secondary site. It wasn't enough for us to do a simple "pull test," we really blew up the primary site to showcase the failover.
A video demonstration and article on how we conducted this super extreme DR test can be found here: www.hp.com/go/disasterproof
Now, HP is building upon our leadership by announcing a way for customers to implement a 2-site, low cost DR solution by synchronously coping data from an XP disk array to any other vendor's array.
As shown in Figure 1 below, this solution uses XP Continuous Access Synchronous in a local loopback fashion where the primary volume is an internal volume within the XP and a secondary volume is an external storage virtual volume residing on the remote external storage array. The maximum distance the external storage may be located away from the XP will depend on the bandwidth and delay tolerance of the application using the storage volumes.
So how might a customer actually use this DR solution in a practical way? Let's say Company A with an XP24000 or XP20000 buys a rival company that uses another vendor's disk arrays. Ordinarily, to create a DR solution between the two merged companies the array technology at one of the companies would have to be replaced so that both array technologies are the same. But since the XP allows numerous vendors' arrays to be attached as external storage nothing need be replaced. By simply adding an XP External Storage license and XP Continuous Access Synchronous license to its existing XP the above DR solution could be quickly and simply implemented without the need for a costly and time consuming hardware upgrade.
For more information visit our StorageWorks XP Disk Array home page.
