Administrator Guide

Metro node use cases
This chapter describes the general features, benefits, and the important use cases of metro node.
Topics:
• General use cases and benefits
• Mobility
• Availability
General use cases and benefits
The following table summarizes the general metro node use cases and their benefits.
Table 2. General metro node use cases and benefits
General use cases Benefits
Mobility
● Migration: Move data and applications without impact on
users.
● Virtual Storage federation: Achieve transparent mobility
and access within a data center and between data centers.
● Scale-out cluster architecture: Start small and grow
larger with predictable service levels.
Availability
● Resiliency: Mirror across arrays within a single data
center or between data centers without host impact. This
increases availability for critical applications.
● Distributed cache coherency: Automate sharing,
balancing, and failover of I/O across the cluster and
between clusters whenever possible.
● Advanced data caching: Improve I/O performance and
reduce storage array contention.
For all metro node deployments, do the following:
● Presents storage volumes from back-end arrays to metro node engines.
● Federates the storage volumes into hierarchies of metro node virtual volumes with user-defined configuration and protection
levels.
● Presents virtual volumes to production hosts in the SAN through the metro node front-end.
● For metro node Metro, presents a global, block-level directory for distributed cache and I/O between metro node clusters.
Mobility
Use metro node to move data between data centers, relocate a data center or consolidate data, without disrupting host
application access to the data.
2
14 Metro node use cases