QuickSpecs

Customer Benefits Disaster Recovery
Replication technology has typically been used to address disaster recovery issues. Disaster
recovery is still the driving business case behind replication. Remote replication can be
implemented from the production site to one or more remote sites across a campus, across
town, across a state or across the country. When a disaster strikes the primary location, the
applications can be brought up at the remote site and continue processing against the replicated
copies. When the primary site is back online, the replication can be reversed and when the data
is resynchronized, processing can be switched back to the primary site and business can
continue. In the past, if an e-mail system experienced a disaster it was an "oh well" moment.
The loss of a day or more of e-mail was not considered important. Today, e-mail is a critical
component of many companies' business plans and recovering e-mail after a disaster quickly
and completely is required.
Maintenance
HP Remote Snap software can also be used to solve other business needs. For instance, E-
mail servers may need periodic maintenance that can take hours to complete. With remote
replication in place, the downtime can be minimal (as long as it takes to bring the remote peer of
the primary e-mail server online). The primary server can be worked on (patches, hardware
upgrades, etc.) and then brought back online and into production. A whole datacenter can be
failed over to a remote site on purpose to perform maintenance on generators, air conditioning,
etc. Replication can also be used to perform a datacenter move with minimal downtime (fail
everything to the DR site, move the production datacenter to its new location then fail the DR
site back to the new datacenter).
Storage Based
Data replication is performed at the storage subsystem controller level and is totally transparent
to the host, alleviating unnecessary host cycles to perform the data mirroring functions. Unlike a
fabric based or host based solution, the storage based solution dedicates its resources to
managing the replication process between arrays, with minimal impact to applications, other
data or devices on the SAN.
Bi-Directional
The bidirectional HP P2000 Array solution addresses the growing need among businesses to
ensure continuous availability of applications that are critical to daily business operations. HP
P2000 enables two sites in a remote replication connection to use each other as a destination to
maintain replicated copies of online data. This maximizes resource utilization while enabling
business continuance, even in the event of disaster.
Disaster Tolerance
The P2000 G3 FC products utilize snapshot data online and in real time to a remote P2000 G3
through a local or extended storage area network (SAN). Additionally, data replication can be
bidirectional, meaning that a storage array can be both a source and a destination. A particular
LUN can be replicated in only one direction between the two storage arrays. Write I/O data sent
to the source is replicated by HP P2000 Array to the destination. A pair of properly configured
HP P2000 G3 FC arrays is a replication solution that guarantees data integrity in the event of a
storage system or site failure.
Normalization (first initial copy)
When a DR site is initially created a normalization or initial copy of the data from the source
volume to the target volume must occur. The P2000 G3 array allows this first copy to take place
locally. After completion the disks can me manually moved to the remote location. Subsequent
changes will only remotely copy the changed blocks.
SAN Extensions
HP P2000 G3 Array provides the capability to replicate data over direct Fibre Channel. The
distances supported over dark fiber are determined by the speed of the dark fiber connection
and the technology used to communicate over the dark fiber.
Path failover (MPIO) MPIO for Windows provides a single multi-path solution for HP P2000 G3 Modular Smart Array
on HP servers.
Support for Windows 2003 and Windows 2003 R2 operating systems is provided by HP MPIO
QuickSpecs
HP MSA P2000 G3 Modular Smart Array System
Optional Software
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