Features and Benefits of HSG80 ACS 8.6P Data Replication Manager

Features and Benefits of HSG80 ACS 8.6P Data Replication Manager 6
DRM Features and Benefits
This section describes the features of DRM and the benefits they provide to the DRM solution.
Disaster tolerance—The redundancy of the DRM hardware provides disaster tolerance. Each
Modular Array (MA) has dual RAID controllers, mirrored cache, dual cache batteries, and dual
power supplies. SANworks Secure Path software or native multipath driver support from the
operating system deliver a multipath driver that automatically fails over to an alternate data path
when dual intersite links and controllers are used in the network.
Disaster recovery—In the event of a disaster, the Compaq SANworks DRM ensures that an
online copy of data is available at the alternate site to support rapid resumption of critical
processing at the alternate site. Resumption can usually occur within minutes, instead of the hours
or days that other disaster recovery plans can take. Failover and failback processing may be done
manually or by an automated script to reduce errors.
Moving data with DRM—The Compaq SANworks DRM can replicate, by remote mirroring,
large quantities of data for data warehousing and data mining applications. DRM is also suited for
moving important data off of storage subsystems temporarily for system maintenance.
Heterogeneous operating systems—DRM supports compatible operating systems sharing the
same controller. To be compatible, all of the operating systems must support the same level of
SCSI command and control. The following table lists the supported operating systems and the
SCSI command level that each operating system supports. Additional information on the sharing
of Compaq storage subsystems is available in the Heterogeneous OpenSAN Design Guide
available at
www.compaq.com/storage/san_index.html
Table 1. Heterogeneous Operating Systems
Operating System Versions SCSI-2 SCSI-3
Compaq OpenVMS 7.2-1H1, 7.2-2, 7.3 No Yes
Compaq Tru64 UNIX 5.1, 5.1a Yes Yes
IBM AIX 4.3.3 Yes No
Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 Yes Yes
Microsoft Windows 2000 Svr., Ad. Svr., DC Yes Yes
Novell NetWare 5.1 Yes Yes
Sun Solaris 7, 8 Yes No
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
function.
Fibre Channel speed—Data replication is performed up to full Fibre Channel speeds
(100 MB/sec) across the SAN. The dual-controller design provides extra processing power to
service host I/O requests. A read-ahead cache mechanism can increase performance 30 percent to
40 percent for applications that sequentially read data.