HP 3PAR Cluster Extension Software Administrator Guide (5697-0925, May 2011)

No server reboot
Disks on the server on both the primary and secondary sites are recognized during the initial system
boot in a HP 3PAR Cluster Extension environment; therefore LUN presentation and LUN mapping
changes are not necessary during failover or failback - for a truly hand-free disaster tolerant solution.
No single point of failure
Supreme redundancy — Identical configuration of established SAN infrastructure redundancies
are implemented on a remote site.
Synchronous mode support
HP 3PAR Remote Copy software offers synchronous data transfer mode between storage systems
and host. Synchronous data transfers offer the highest levels of data protection. With synchronous
operations, both the primary and secondary copies are identical and concurrent at all times.
Synchronous mirroring ensures that data copies are identical, to prevent critical data loss in the
event of a failure or disaster. In this mode, data is written simultaneously to the mirrored cache of
the primary storage system and the secondary storage system, in real time, before the application
I/O is completed, thus ensuring the highest possible data consistency. Synchronous replication is
appropriate when exact consistency is critical to the business application.
Storage system configurations
Cluster configurations typically consist of two or more server systems connected to a shared storage
system. HP 3PAR Cluster Extension allows the dispersion of data center resources by enabling
cluster systems to take advantage of HP 3PAR storage systems configured for Remote Copy
operations. HP 3PAR Cluster Extension uses HP 3PAR InForm OS Command Line Interface (CLI) to
control the HP 3PAR storage systems (and Remote Copy) with the cluster software, and uses cluster
software to react to system hardware and application failures.
HP 3PAR Cluster Extension behavior is based on four major considerations:
• Cluster software failover behaviors
• HP 3PAR Cluster Extension user settings
• The replication mode setting for HP 3PAR Remote Copy, which is used to configure the remote
replication feature of a 3PAR storage system environment based on your needs for application
service availability, data concurrency, and replication performance
• Remote Copy volume group and virtual volume status information
HP 3PAR Cluster Extension supports the following configurations:
• 1-to-1
• N-to-1 (the logical configuration must be a one-to-one configuration). See Figure 2 (page 9).
• 1-to-N (the logical configuration must be a one-to-one configuration). See Figure 2 (page 9).
NOTE: Synchronous long distance and unidirectional remote copy configurations are not
supported.
1-to-1 configuration
When setting up a one-to-one configuration (see Figure 2 (page 9)), consider the following:
• Cluster nodes are split between two or more geographically dispersed data center sites and
use redundant, diversely routed network connections for intra-cluster communications. Those
links must be as reliable as possible to prevent false failover operations or split-brain situations.
• Each cluster node connected to a HP 3PAR storage system should have redundant I/O paths
to the HP 3PAR storage system. Connections to both the source (primary) and the destination
8 HP 3PAR Cluster Extension features