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
QuickSpecs
HP MSA P2000 G3 Modular Smart Array System
Hardware
DA - 13551 Worldwide QuickSpecs — Version 39 — 5.9.2014 Page 23