HPE announced the (long awaited) availability of Synchronous Replication for its Nimble storage portfolio at HPE Discover in Madrid.
A Nimble system is known for it’s 99,9999 availability per system. However, this is not enough for disasters or data center outage. We don’t even mention human error… With Sync Replication HPE eliminates the fault domain of a single storage array.
Therefore, we see a lot of customers choosing for synchronous replication solutions like StoreVirtual (VSA) and 3PAR… Nimble was missing in this picture. Until now.
Replication will be volume based and can be bi-directional. Volumes can be active on both arrays to create an active-active setup across the data centers.
Sync Replication will be a built-in software feature, as far as I understood will it be a free feature, so no additional license cost (unlike with 3PAR).
It is not only Sync Replication. Like the 3PAR platform, HPE adds Peer Persistence functionality which means that you will create a metro-storage cluster, where the volume will fail over automatically in case of a site failure.
Failover will be transparent for applications. At launch Microsoft SQL Server and VMware vSphere workloads will be supported, Oracle is on the roadmap amongst some others.
Additional information I got is that initially the new Gen5 and 1000 series of systems will be supported (except the xxH models), and arrays must be same models within the group.A Linux based witness cluster will be required as arbiter, this might change after time, however.FC and iSCSI will be supported. ALUA mechanisms will be used to determine the active and standby paths to the primary and secondary array.
The availability is currently under controlled release, in Q1 2019 the code should go GA.
More information can be found meanwhile in a ChalkTalk video created by Calvin Zito aka HPEStorageGuy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkhBOLoQGMw
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