EMC offers a somewhat more Hurricane Sandy proof array
Data can be in two places at the same time
Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery
EMC's array-virtualising and federating VPLEX product now supports vMotion workload flow between active-active data centres up to 200km (a little over 125 miles) apart, twice as far as before.
VPLEX is a box, running the Geosynchrony OS, that sits on front of an array and communicates with another VPLEX box sitting in front of a second array and enables them to federate and work together. Customers can access a single version of data at the two locations. They can also move applications, data and VSphere virtual machines non-disruptively between the two arrays. On top of that VPLEX can also virtualise third-party arrays.
The two arrays can be in the same data centre, and until now, could be in different ones up to 100km apart when in an active-active relationship. However, the farther apart two data centres are, the better placed they are for disaster recovery. VPLEX Metro now supports two data centres up to 200km apart with a 10ms round-trip latency. EMC says that this ensures "that updated VMware vSphere vMotion data can be in two places at the same time during a move — with twice the distance as before."
EMC has also devised VPLEX Metro Express Edition that combines VPLEX with RecoverPoint continuous data protection software, and says this "enables mission-critical availability between two data centres.
A third part of EMC's announcement is that VPLEX and RecoverPoint can automatically load balancing WANs to improve network availability and utilisation, "through support for EMC RAPIDPath technology, which transforms VPLEX and RecoverPoint WAN connectivity from active-passive to active-active." It means that the network connectivity between two VPLEX locations can continue across a link failure. In that situation VPLEX will route traffic over a second link without breaking network connectivity or requiring a WAN failover process to take place.
EMC implies that the two VPLEX boxes can be in a hybrid cloud, with one in an enterprise data centre and the other in a public cloud data centre. This could be a chicken-and-egg scenario though. Public cloud service providers won't take up VPLEX to provide active failover to the public cloud from private cloud data centres using VPLEX until they see lots of private cloud data centres using VPLEX, and vice versa.
It might be the case that someone in EMC is thinking of Hopkinton itself providing a public cloud data centre, probably with partners, to provide a VPLEX-front-ended public cloud data centre facility to be the active:active fall-back for private cloud data centres using VPLEX. ®
COMMENTS
Somewhat more Hurricane Sandy proof?
Really? I read that Sandy itself was around 1000 miles wide. That means EMC will need to double that twice more before you start to TOUCH on Sandy-proof. So I'd say not even somewhat more.
Re: Somewhat more Hurricane Sandy proof?
I think the point the article is making is that your data can be active in two different places meaning you can avoid an outage when if whole DC goes down as a result of Sandy.....not that you can avoid the whole reach of hurricane Sandy.
Pedantry in a humorous vein
Sent to me and I couldn't resist posting it here:-
Dear Mr. Mellor,
I realize it is a bit of a quibble, but shouldn't that be 'about 125 miles', 'a bit under 125 miles', or (most accurately), 'a bit over 124 miles'?
I will restrain my pedantic metric tendencies, and not grumble about the different sizes of mile...
Anon - name withheld by me.
PMT is now an acronym for Pendantic Metric Tendencies :-)
Chris.
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