At HP Discover in Las Vegas were quite some announcements on storage side. An important functionality added was the Remote Copy Async Streaming feature.
So far the replication options between multiple 3PAR’s were Synchronous, Asynchronous Periodic and SLD Sync Long Distance for their Disaster Recovery plan.
- Synchronous is the only choice when the customer wants an RPO of 0. A given requirement was a latency of max 2ms RTT as best practice.
- Asynchronous Periodic allows higher latencies and so greater distances between the arrays. There is choice of time and frequency (min 5 minutes) and also the required bandwidth is less critical. However RTO is situated in the minutes or above range.
- SLD Sync Long Distance is a unique 3PAR solution which is a 3-datacenter replication solution where you can get RPO of 0 on longer distances. This is accomplished by 2 arrays being replicated synchronously and then a dual Async Periodic replication to the 3rd array on long distance.
Now there is a 4th option being Async Streaming. Unlike Async Periodic, where you have to wait for the scheduled interval to have a snapshot being taken and replicated to the other array, now the next snapshot will be taken directly after the previous one is replicated. So we have a continuous stream of asynchronous transfers one after another… Which will give a RPO of seconds instead of minutes or more for the Async Period option.
This new replication option will be available in the upcoming 3.2.2 3PAR OS release on all 3PAR 7000, 10000 and 20000 platforms and requires the Remote Copy license.
This means that you have now 4 replication options between any midrange, enterprise and AFA all-flash arrays. Something I do not see at any other storage vendor out there. A good reason for those customers out there to choose for a completely scalable and federated storage platform.
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