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15 PS Series Asynchronous Replication Best Practices and Sizing Guide | BP1012
4 Test topology and architecture
To properly design a replication scenario, administrators must understand how the quality of the network
connection between groups can affect replication. Also, as discussed previously, when data changes on the
source volume, it will be replicated over the network link. The amount of changes occurring will directly affect
how long it takes for each replica to complete. To help illustrate these points, asynchronous replication was
set up in a lab and test results gathered.
The test configuration (see Figure 5) consisted of a designated primary site and secondary site, although all
of the hardware was physically located in the same data center. Storage on the primary side used three PS
Series PS6010XV arrays connected to a pair of Dell PC8024F switches. All three members were configured
as a single pool.
The secondary side used another pair of Dell switches and a single PS Series PS6510E array configured in
the default pool. For redundancy, each pair of PC8024F switches was connected by creating a LAG (Link
Aggregation Group) using two 10 Gb ports on each switch, and the storage controller ports were distributed
across the switches. The primary and secondary sites were connected through an Apposite
®
Technologies
Netropy
®
10G WAN emulator. This allowed throttling of bandwidth and adding impairments such as latency to
the WAN connection to simulate the various speeds and conditions that one might encounter with a WAN.
The primary site connected a Dell EMC PowerEdge™ R610 server to the PC8024F iSCSI SAN switches. The
PowerEdge R610 ran Microsoft Windows Server
®
2008 R2, which allowed mounting of the volumes and
generating disk I/O to overwrite or change the existing data on the disk. Several volumes of 100 GB and 10
GB were created to use for replication testing. This configuration was used throughout all testing unless noted
in the individual test cases later in this document.
4/10
5/11
6/12
STACK ID
3/9 Unit 7-121/7 2/8MASTER
PWRRPS
FAN
DIAG
TEMP
RESET
LNK/ACT LNK/ACT LNK/ACT LNK/ACT
49 50 51 52
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46 48
47
FDX
/HDX
LNK
/ACT
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
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9
10
11
12
13
14
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16
17
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19
20
21
22
23
24
PC6248
4/10
5/11
6/12
STACK ID
3/9Unit 7-121/72/8MASTER
PWRRPS
FAN
DIAG
TEMP
RESET
LNK/ACTLNK/ACTLNK/ACTLNK/ACT
49505152
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
4648
47
FDX
/HDX
LNK
/ACT
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
PC6248
RESET
PWR
TEMP
RPS
FAN
DIAG
STACK ID
5/116/124/10
3/9Unit 7-122/81/7
MASTER
222324FDX
22
21LNK/ACT
242018
21231917
21231917
LNK/ACT
1315119
22242017
14161210
14161210
1315119
LNK/ACT
5731
5731
LNK/ACT
6842
6842
RESET
PWR
TEMP
RPS
FAN
DIAG
STACK ID
5/116/124/10
3/9Unit 7-122/81/7
MASTER
222324FDX
22
21LNK/ACT
242018
21231917
21231917
LNK/ACT
1315119
22242017
14161210
14161210
1315119
LNK/ACT
5731
5731
LNK/ACT
6842
6842
RESET
PWR
TEMP
RPS
FAN
DIAG
STACK ID
5/116/124/10
3/9Unit 7-122/81/7
MASTER
222324FDX
22
21LNK/ACT
242018
21231917
21231917
LNK/ACT
1315119
22242017
14161210
14161210
1315119
LNK/ACT
5731
5731
LNK/ACT
6842
6842
PC8024F
PS6510E
RESET
PWR
TEMP
RPS
FAN
DIAG
STACK ID
5/11 6/124/10
3/9 Unit 7-122/81/7
MASTER
22 23 24 FDX
22
21LNK/ACT
242018
21 231917
21 231917
LNK/ACT
13 15119
22 242017
14 161210
14 161210
13 15119
LNK/ACT
5 731
5 731
LNK/ACT
6 842
6 842
PC8024F
Primary site Secondary site
POWER
CONSOLE
MGMT
PORT 1 PORT 2
PORT 3 PORT 4 PORT 5 PORT 6
TEC HNO LOG IES
NETROPY 10G
PS6010XV
PowerEdge R610
PowerEdge R610
Netropy 10G
Test topology