Data Protection Provisioning 2.0
Third platform applications are changing the way organizations manage, consume, deliver and protect storage. They are increasingly cloud-enabled, use sophisticated development frameworks, and are instantly available from any device. However, many existing applications are still in traditional and dedicated storage silos with restricted protection policies and provisioning has one basic purpose – connect well-known users to on-premise enterprise applications. Provisioning 1.0 operates with only an IT focus, with no business context and is in the dark ages. Provisioning 2.0 has emerged as a modern and agile way to fill the provisioning gap and is guided by a few key characteristics: business-driven, simple user experience, intuitive process, easy to deploy and maintain, and meets cloud and mobile demands.
In this second of a 3-part blog series, let’s take a look at how EMC ViPR Controller provides a single, software-defined management control point for automating the delivery of data protection services with EMC VPLEX and EMC RecoverPoint.
EMC ViPR Controller Together with VPLEX and RecoverPoint
In our first blog, we stated that ViPR Controller is storage automation software that discovers, abstracts, pools, and provisions primary and protection storage, simplifying the configuration and management of data protection services. VPLEX delivers unmatched continuous availability and non-disruptive data mobility within and across data centers over distance for mission-critical applications. And, RecoverPoint enables unparalleled RPO and RTO through local and remote replication and any point-in-time recovery for superior operational and disaster recovery. Together, these three technologies offer compelling use cases: Continuous Availability, Changing Class of Service and Disaster Recovery.
Continuous Availability
ViPR Controller automates, monitors and provisions the capabilities of the underlying intelligent arrays virtualized by VPLEX such as XtremIO, VMAX and VNX or other third-party storage vendors as part of the self-service provisioning process. ViPR Controller can now automate protection of customers’ most critical applications with MetroPoint topology using VPLEX Metro continuous availability and RecoverPoint CDP for both metro sites and remote replication to the third DR site. MetroPoint topology can be configured in 5 steps, a 91% reduction.
With ViPR Controller, customers can take crash consistent snapshots, continuous copies and mirrors for a set of VPLEX volumes within a consistency group leveraging VMAX or VNX or array-based snapshot technology.
ViPR Controller now automates provisioning of VPLEX Local and Metro volumes protected by RecoverPoint with XtremIO as the back-end storage in 5 steps, an 81% reduction compared to manual steps.
Changing Class of Service
If workload service-level objectives change, organizations can leverage VPLEX to automatically and non-disruptively move these workloads to a different storage class of service via the ViPR Controller user interface. Using the ViPR Controller self-service portal, Storage Administrators can specify an existing or new virtual storage pool with the appropriate attributes for the workload. A high-performance service level, for example, that once accessed VNX FC storage may get changed in ViPR Controller to access VMAX SSD storage. In this case, VPLEX would non-disruptively move data associated with the service from VNX to VMAX to align the modified service level to the appropriate storage. ViPR Controller leverages VPLEX to non-disruptively move the application data to a physical array that matches the new storage pool attributes.
Disaster Recovery
ViPR Controller can provision local and remote replication for operational and disaster recovery through RecoverPoint including replication settings for multiple LUNs in a single consistency group. ViPR Controller can automate consistency groups for federated data sets across arrays with RecoverPoint. And, it can start, stop, failover and failback RecoverPoint volumes.
Tune in next week for Part 3 of this blog series! To learn more, please visit the ViPR Controller and VPLEX and RecoverPoint product pages on www.emc.com.