Business Continuity with the Violin Flash Storage Platform Layers of Protection for Here, Near and Anywhere Data Availability Version 1.0 Abstract Violin s Flash Storage Platform has Continuous Data Protection (CDP), an all-flash-array based solution that provides comprehensive data protection functions such as mirroring, snapshots, journaling, remote replication, and automated disaster recovery (DR) from an application perspective, to meet enterprise computing requirements.
Table of Contents 1. Data Protection... 3 2. Protection for Here... 4 2.1. Mirroring... 4 2.2. Backups... 4 2.2.1. Application Consistent Snapshots... 4 2.2.2. Virtual Server Protection... 4 3. Protection for Near... 5 3.1. Stretch Clusters for Metro Area Protection... 5 3.2. Near-zero RTO the Key to Business Availability... 5 4. Protection for Anywhere... 5 4.1. WAN-Optimized Replication... 5 4.2. DR Automation for Fast, Simple Recovery... 6 5. Summary... 7
1. Data Protection Business IT operations continue to grow in size and complexity, while budgets shrink or remain stagnant. Mixed IT assets such as servers, operating systems, applications, networking, and storage require data to always be available regardless of the environment. Managing complex IT configurations affects the reliability and confidence of recoverability, further straining already stressed organizations. Violin s Flash Storage Platform (FSP) has integrated advanced business continuance capabilities into its Concerto OS 7 operating system that eliminates issues of complexity and reliability. FSP continuous data protection (CDP) approaches data protection from the unique perspective of both application and service availability, resulting in comprehensive and automated recovery for all critical applications, business data, and services. FSP s CDP enables organizations to define, meet, and even exceed IT SLAs, while protecting data in a way that supports application and organizational goals. FSP s CDP offers technical innovation centered on delivering tangible business benefits with resilient operations and costeffective IT services. This all-inclusive, all-flash array based solution enables business application protection and data assurance for even the most demanding environments. CDP provides application-specific data protection for applications including Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and others, along with near-instant recovery, remote replication, and disaster recovery automation. As data volumes grow, demands on the supporting infrastructure place increased strain on equipment and staff budgets. CDP supports growing data volumes, supporting LUN sizes of up to 64TB. An advanced multi-threaded architecture enables fast, simultaneous operations such as replication, compression, and encryption. Figure 1-1. CDP for Here, Near and Anywhere Protection
2. Protection for Here 2.1. Mirroring Concerto OS 7 synchronous mirroring provides block-level data mirroring across FSPs over a Fibre Channel SAN. Data synchronizes to a second storage device independent of the servers involved with just a few mouse clicks. There is no need for system-specific host-based tools. Once the mirror is online, all future data is written simultaneously to both the primary volume and the mirror. Built-in, tunable mirror monitoring continually checks for lag time in the write speed between sides of the mirror, which could reside on two separate devices. If lag times are too large, the mirroring process will automatically suspend to minimize the impact to the production server. The mirror will then re-synchronize as soon as possible without impacting server performance. 2.2. Backups FSP s CDP eliminates the disruptive nature of traditional backup operations. CDP provides backup on secondary storage volumes that need not be all-flash arrays; offering as many as 1,000 snapshots per LUN. This eliminates any loading or disruption to production applications and volumes. FSP backup connects to all major backup systems for your operational efficiency. Centralized backup can be performed off of secondary FSP CDP snapshot volumes. This out-of-band configuration isolates all backup-related loads from physical or virtual production servers. FSP automatically mounts snapshots from CDP to a backup server in order to backup data to your physical tape or virtual tape library. Because backup occurs directly from the secondary storage, critical production applications are not impacted. 2.2.1. Application Consistent Snapshots Critical and valuable data is most often derived from a particular business application, such as a database, ERP, CRM, or financial/accounting system. Without application awareness, protection and recovery of these data volumes can be crashconsistent but not application consistent, resulting in data loss or corruption. FSP s CDP provides application-aware snapshot agents for most popular business applications. Up to 1,000 snapshots are available per protection volume, for the most flexible and comprehensive up-to-the-moment recovery points. Snapshots can be instantly mounted in an application-consistent state for recovery of individual files and database objects, or for entire volumes. CDP offers up to 1,000 snapshots per volume, enabling true flash-to-disk or flash-to-flash backup. Intelligent snapshot scheduling and retention policies provide instant backup functionality covering weeks or months worth of data. Larger environments can simplify multiple snapshot operations by leveraging a consistency group feature, which allows multiple data protection operations to be performed simultaneously. 2.2.2. Virtual Server Protection As more businesses realize the productivity gains associated with server virtualization, it becomes increasingly important for them to protect those virtual machine host servers, along with their associated data. CDP provides comprehensive data protection for physical and virtual servers, supporting hypervisors from VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, and Citrix. Just as traditional agent-based backup operations impose severe CPU and system loads on individual servers, multiple virtual servers residing on a single physical host greatly amplify this effect and often cripples CPU and I/O performance. CDP does not consume virtual or physical server resources for data protection; rather it protects, replicates, and backs up virtual and physical server data directly from CDP secondary protection volumes. The result is near-linear protection, without disruption, for even dense VM deployments.
3. Protection for Near 3.1. Stretch Clusters for Metro Area Protection Primary storage cannot fail. Therefore, HA is a firm requirement. When deployed in clusters, the FSP offers HA functionality. A special communication link between FSP nodes continuously synchronizes I/O and metadata between the pair of FSPs over a Fibre Channel link. The HA pair tolerates node failures or temporary upgrades with minimal, if any, disruption to primary storage volumes. Combining the benefit of HA and disaster recovery, the stretch cluster functionality allows you to deploy a HA solution between two geographically separated sites. In case of failure on one site, data is immediately available at the other site without change, as the data sets are constantly synchronized. Figure 3-1. FSP Stretch Clusters 3.2. Near-zero RTO the Key to Business Availability Recovery of email, files, database objects, or entire servers is the essential objective of any data protection strategy. FSP s CDP delivers comprehensive local and remote data recovery, with fast and straightforward access to recovery data. The innovative architecture of CDP enables local data recovery in as little as five minutes for files or objects, and as little as ten minutes for bare-metal server recovery. Remote recovery of data or servers is equally fast and intuitive, with complete site recovery in as little as 30 minutes. 4. Protection for Anywhere 4.1. WAN-Optimized Replication As organizations grow organically or via merger or acquisition activities, they often accumulate disparate networking resources and can have facilities in several different locations. In addition, monthly bandwidth costs increase significantly with each higher telecommunication link (T1, T3, OC3, OC12, and others). FSP s CDP enables efficient and robust replication between data centers, leveraging sophisticated data link technologies to make the most of expensive inter-location connections. To minimize
bandwidth requirements, CDP provides WAN-optimized replication with compression and deduplication for improved bandwidth efficiency and data encryption (in-flight) to guard against unauthorized disclosure. FSP technology minimizes the amount of data transmitted by eliminating redundancy at the application and file system layers. Rather than arbitrarily transmitting entire blocks or pages (as is typical of other replication solutions), FSP technology maps, identifies, and transmits only unique blocks, reducing network traffic and bandwidth requirements by as much as 95%. Meanwhile, adaptive replication automatically switches between continuous and periodic data transmission in the event of temporary bandwidth link outage or throughput degradation. Periodic replication queues data for subsequent transmission, while preserving write-order fidelity. Figure 4-1. FSP Remote Replication 4.2. DR Automation for Fast, Simple Recovery When a disaster or failure strikes, there are a number of complex procedures required in order to fully recover IT business operations. The FSP s CDP provides a unique tool, which automates complex and error-prone manual disaster recovery operations, allowing all associated applications and services to be brought back online remotely as quickly as possible. In addition, CDP facilitates non-intrusive disaster recovery testing, allowing organizations to identify potential recovery issues before actual disasters occur. FSP technology maps the logical relationships between applications, servers, and associated data volumes at a primary site with corresponding applications, servers, and data volumes at a recovery site. A broad range of capabilities includes dependencies such as order of start, which ensure proper resumption of business operations at the remote site. To reduce the cost of remote disaster recovery sites, the 7300 FSP provides data reduction services that can reduce the amount of space required to store data. A best practices configuration would include thick LUNs in the primary data center replicating to data reduced LUNs at t the remote disaster recovery site to keep costs down. With FSP you get the best of performance and cost with our Enterprise Data Services.
5. Summary FSP s CDP brings recovery and backup to all-flash arrays with sophistication and performance that enables enterprises to employ the right solution for their business needs. The ability to replicate and backup data from a high performance all-flash array, such as the FSP, means that the overall speed and efficiency of your cloud or data center are preserved. With the FSP you get protection for Here, Near and Anywhere events to keep your data safe. For more information go to www.violin-memory.com Table 5.1. Concerto OS 7 Feature Summary Concerto OS 7 Data Services: Broad Classification Features Sub-Features Value Proposition Performance 500K IOPS fully loaded Transformative performance Protocols Protocols FC, ISCSI Block Common SAN protocols Multipathing Support Data Protection Services Enterprise Data Protection Solutions Enables Multipathing Support for host OS Windows FC, AIX, Linux Features Sub-Features Value Proposition Supports All/Complete Enterprise Ranges/Configurations RPO 0 to Hours RTO 0 to Hours High Performance, Load Balance, Resiliency Zero Data Loss App recovery Snap Shots Read Data Protection Services, Analytics etc Consistency Groups Continuous Data Protection Write Crash Consistent App Consistent Atomic Snap across multiple LUNs RPO (0 to hours) Test and Dev. Apps Backup/Business Continuance Enable reduced RTO Enables app consistent snapshots/rapid app recovery Enables Any Point Recovery, surgical recovery of production data from any point, compliance analytics without impacting production data, data warehouse seeding, at the end of period (month, quarter etc), a point in time reproduction of data for archiving, compliance or analytics.
Concerto OS 7 Data Services: Broad Classification Enables App Consistent Snapshots Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Enabling Integration to Backup Environment Features Sub-Features Value Proposition Host agents for app consistent Replication Replication Efficiency Asynchronous (app consistent) Continuous Data Replication Patented WAN Optimized Compression Bandwidth Throttling MSSQL, MS Exchange, Oracle, MySQL, VMWare, DB2 Local, Metro, Over WAN Journal based replication with app consistency Intelligent Adaptive Replication Schedule Better use of bandwidth Better use of bandwidth Better use of bandwidth Stretch Cluster Sync Mirroring Enables DR with 0 RPO and 0 RTO LUN Mirroring Ecosystem Integration Plug-in Automated App Disaster Recovery Backup Application Integration through AutoMount Stretch Cluster Tie Breaker Server Image Enables availability across array failure SRM Integration Automated App Disaster Recovery Seamless integration of V7000 into customer backup environment in ALL OS server environments Enables sync replication monitoring/management Protects against array failures DR Tests without any disruption. Integrated DR management in VM environs Host management agent for app recovery in case site failures (DR) Windows, Linux, VMware with most backup applications Snapshot Validation CheckSnap Verifying snap integrity For maintenance and support verifying snapshot integrity Storage Efficiency, Virtualization, Scale up Features Sub-Features Value Proposition Thin Provisioning Thin Enables Storage Efficiency Don't waste unused capacity Clone Clone Thin Clones Test, Dev., Analytics Storage Virtualization Scale Up Abstracted LUN provisioning & LUN expansion Non-Disruptive Capacity Pooling Across Arrays Thick Clones Add capacity to LUNs as needed provision LUN independent of physical HW Expand to include capacity from other Violin arrays (16 TB to 256TB) Analytics/Data transformation on demand
Ecosystem Integration Features Sub-Features Value Proposition VAAI Support VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) Support Optimized deployment in VM Environment (Faster VM clone, VM migration, etc.) Automated DR for VM deployment ESX enabler for increased productivity Recovery productivity Microsoft Support SMI-S plug-ins Windows 2012 SMI-S plug-in for System Center Snapshot Director with Agents Coordinated intelligent snapshot management of apps in VM's for local backup and DR Snapshot management productivity Management SW Features Sub-Features Value Proposition Plug-ins for data center Management tools Plug-ins for Applications Plug-ins for Backup Management SRM, SnapShot Director, SMI-S Snapshot Director DR app agents MSSQL, MS Exchange, Oracle, MySQL, VMware, DB2 AutoMount for Windows, Linux, VMWare with most backup application Snapshot management productivity Snapshot management productivity Operations productivity Data Security Features Sub-Features Value Proposition Replication Encryption for Data-in-Flight Data Encryption for Data-at-Rest Keep existing backup procedures for reduced management costs Protects against packet sniffing Protects data at rest from hacking
About Violin Systems Business in a Flash. Violin Systems transforms the speed of business with high performance, always available, low cost management of critical business information and applications. Violin s All Flash optimized solutions accelerate breakthrough CAPEX and OPEX savings for building the next generation data center. Violin s Flash Fabric Architecture (FFA) speeds data delivery with chip-to-chassis performance optimization that achieves lower consistent latency and cost per transaction for Cloud, Enterprise and Virtualized mission-critical applications. Violin's All Flash Arrays and Appliances, and enterprise data management software solutions enhance agility and mobility while revolutionizing data center economics. Founded in 2005, Violin Systems is headquartered in San Jose, California. For more information, visit www.violin-systems.com. Follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/violinsystems.