Dell EMC PowerStore Metro Node Enables Automated BC

By Rami Katz, VP, product management, mid-range, entry and PowerFlex, Dell EMC

In the data era, information needs to be always available. This is reflected worldwide by regulations requiring synchronous data mirroring to prevent outages and critical data loss.

Powerstore Metro Node

Most institutions now require a BC plan in addition to a DR plan for IT that provides ‘continuous availability’ to keep business application data intact and current after a site or data center outage. In addition, few companies today can sustain 24-hour data center operations, so many IT BC plans now require automatically initiated site failover in case of an outage to further reduce the possibility of critical data loss.

Introducing Dell EMC PowerStore metro node
With that in mind, Dell Technologies is introducing Dell EMC metro node, to address these BC challenges. Unlike some industry active-passive solutions, metro node provides true active-active metro configurations by allowing simultaneous writes at both sites and supports RPO and RTO equal to zero. Zero RPO means there’s an expectation for zero data loss. It means the time to recover is zero time or immediately. In addition, PowerStore metro node is designed to automatically initiate an instant site failover through its VM witness technology.

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Why is metro replication important to BC?
Only metro synchronous replication, which includes mirrored storage systems with an active-active configuration, can provide RPO and RTO equal to zero. You can implement PowerStore metro node with the confidence that data will always be available and accessible within metro Round Trip Time (RTT) boundaries of less than 10 milliseconds.

“The PowerStore metro node was fully capable of synchronizing our workloads across two separate PowerStore arrays while delivering superior performance,” said Bryan Peroutka, technical solutions architect, World Wide Technology. “It features a very quick, responsive and easy to navigate interface and it’s very space efficient, only adding an additional 2U to our PowerStore footprint. It’s an ideal addition to any company’s BC strategy.“

Benefits of metro node

• Volume/LUN level granularity
  Allows the replication of specific LUNs for application level granularity, reducing TCO and improving flexibility by giving the choice of which workloads to replicate.

• Non-disruptive addition of consistency groups
  Supports consistency group add/delete operations without disruption. This provides operational flexibility with zero downtime and means you can add or remove volumes to consistency groups without breaking the replication.

• Multi-platform support
  Enables replication between different Dell EMC array types.

• Avoid degradation to array performance
  Metro node replication has zero performance impact on the storage array.

• No additional host software
  It’s self-contained and does not require any software to be deployed on the hosts or a host reboot.

• Provides multiple capabilities and configurations
  In addition to synchronous metro replication, PowerStore metro node can also support local configurations for continuous application availability, data mobility to non-disruptively relocate workloads and enables storage technology refresh without application downtime.

• Compact form factor with high performance
  The PowerStore metro node cluster is comprised of 2 1U units which support 32Gb FC.

Resources:
PowerStore family of all-flash storage appliances
PowerStore metro node DS