h11926: using emc vplex in service-provider and cloud-provider

White Paper

EMC Solutions Group

Abstract

This white paper provides a high level overview of various ways that service providers and cloud providers can benefit from EMC VPLEX in their environments. For facilitating storage array migrations, building scale-out storage clusters, or building active/active data center environments to provide zero downtime operations, EMC VPLEX is a powerful tool which can assist with these various needs.

July 2013

USING EMC VPLEX IN SERVICE-PROVIDER AND CLOUD-PROVIDER ENVIRONMENTS

Scale-out architectures for growing environments using EMC VPLEX and EMC VNX storage arrays

Non-disruptive data migrations for cloud on-boarding AlwaysOn continuous availability and disaster recovery for Cloud

environments

2 Using EMC VPLEX in Service-Provider and Cloud-Provider Environments

Copyright © 2013 EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

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All trademarks used herein are the property of their respective owners.

Part Number: H11926


Table of contents

Executive summary ............................................................................................................................... 5

Business case .................................................................................................................................. 5

Solution overview ............................................................................................................................ 5

Key results and recommendations ................................................................................................... 5

Introduction.......................................................................................................................................... 6

Purpose ........................................................................................................................................... 6

Scope .............................................................................................................................................. 6

Audience ......................................................................................................................................... 6

Use case overview............................................................................................................................ 6

Introduction to EMC VPLEX ................................................................................................................... 7

Evolution of storage technology ....................................................................................................... 7

VPLEX federated storage .................................................................................................................. 7

A solution for one or multiple data centers ....................................................................................... 8

VPLEX and VMware ........................................................................................................................ 10

Service provider use case: non-disruptive data migration ................................................................. 11

Traditional storage array migration and technology refresh ............................................................ 11

VPLEX reduces cost, time to implement, and eliminates downtime during migration ...................... 12

Positioning data migration services for service providers ............................................................... 13

Data migration with VPLEX: benefits to service providers and their customers ............................... 14

Service provider use case: scale-out storage using mid-tier arrays ................................................... 15

Start small and scale non-disruptively as required ......................................................................... 15

Brief introduction to EMC VNX ........................................................................................................ 15

EMC VNX and EMC VPLEX combined with VMware vSphere ............................................................ 16

Revenue model: monolithic initial implementation versus scale-out ............................................. 17

Minimizing costs, but planning for non-disruptive growth .............................................................. 19

Service provider use case: active/active workloads across data centers ........................................... 21

Traditional active/passive data centers .......................................................................................... 21

VPLEX brings true active/active deployments between data centers ............................................... 22

Service providers can offer industry leading SLAs with active/active implementations ................... 23

Service provider use case: disaster recovery protection for active/active data centers using EMC VPLEX and EMC RecoverPoint ........................................................................................................................ 24

Brief introduction to EMC RecoverPoint .......................................................................................... 24

EMC VPLEX and RecoverPoint integration ....................................................................................... 25

Using VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) with RecoverPoint ..................................................... 26


Disaster recovery enabled active/active data centers ..................................................................... 26

Summary: using EMC VPLEX in service provider and cloud provider environments ............................ 28

VPLEX: a fit for any provider ........................................................................................................... 28

References.......................................................................................................................................... 29

White papers ................................................................................................................................. 29


Executive summary

For many years, traditional service providers have offered low-end, commoditized services such as co-location space in their data centers and Internet bandwidth. However, they now recognize the dramatic increases in both revenue and profit margins as they build on those traditional offerings with high-end, value added services such as managed infrastructure, managed applications, and various cloud as-a-service products.

EMC® VPLEX®, which utilizes storage virtualization technologies, can help enable service providers and cloud providers to offer their customers more of these value-added services, thus allowing them to partner with their enterprise clients to manage larger pieces of their infrastructure and capture additional revenue streams.

This white paper discusses the many ways in which service providers and cloud providers can utilize EMC VPLEX to offer their customers a variety of new products and services. It is meant to serve as a reference for these providers to demonstrate the use cases and deployment models for using EMC VPLEX in a provider environment.

There will be an introduction to EMC VPLEX, followed by discussions around some example use cases faced by a provider servicing enterprise customers.

This white paper proposes that service providers and cloud providers can deploy EMC VPLEX to help them build the following product offerings which can be sold to their enterprise customers:

Storage Array Migration—Providers can deploy EMC VPLEX to help with both internal and customer migrations from one storage platform or array to another. They can also use VPLEX to enable non-disruptive cloud on-boarding to their managed service offerings and cloud infrastructures.

Scale-Out Storage Architecture—Providers can use EMC VNX mid-tier storage platforms to build their initial environments and leverage EMC VPLEX to scale those out as they grow, without causing downtime to their customers or applications.

Active/Active Data Center Operations—EMC VPLEX can enable true active/active operations between multiple data centers allowing providers to offer non-disruptive continuous availability for the tenant’s critical workloads.

Continuous Availability with Disaster Recovery (DR)—In addition to offering active/active configurations, EMC VPLEX can be used in conjunction with EMC RecoverPoint® to provide disaster recovery for critical workloads.

Business case

Solution overview

Key results and recommendations


Introduction

The purpose of this document is to provide an overview of the various use cases and deployment models for EMC VPLEX in the service-provider and cloud-provider market. EMC VPLEX serves many different enterprise needs. It offers a solution for many product options provider may want to offer.

The paper begins with a technology overview of EMC VPLEX, followed by discussion of some simple use cases, such as technology refresh and storage array migration. More advanced use cases are then covered, including scale-out storage implementations, active/active data centers for continuous availability, and disaster recovery for high availability environments.

The scope of this white paper is to aid providers in building product offerings that take advantage of EMC VPLEX. The white paper does not include detailed configuration recommendations.

This white paper is intended for service providers and cloud providers and the architects, engineers, and product managers working with them to build their product offerings. Knowledge of cloud infrastructures, storage practices, data center architectures, and virtualization technologies is highly recommended.

This paper highlights several ways that service providers can use EMC VPLEX to build value-added services that provide additional customer-based revenue streams. An overview of these use cases is outlined below:

Using EMC VPLEX, service providers can offer non-disruptive data migrations that enable risk-free, faster technology refreshes, upgrades, and load balancing.

EMC VPLEX allows service providers to start small when building their cloud environments, adding storage to support the environment as customer demand and usage grows. EMC VPLEX is used to virtualize EMC VNX® mid-tier storage arrays so that the providers will be able to add additional storage without causing any downtime to the end users or applications running in their cloud environments.

Service providers can enable non-disruptive virtual machine mobility within and between data centers using EMC VPLEX.

EMC VPLEX enables service providers to build true continuous availability infrastructures between data centers, enabling true active/active workload distribution between multiple facilities.

Combined with EMC RecoverPoint®, EMC VPLEX further enables providers to implement active/active data centers within the same metro area, while allowing a tertiary data center to serve as a disaster recovery site where all production data is replicated. This provides the ultimate combination of continuous availability and disaster recovery for high-value mission-critical applications where even a small outage could prove disastrous to business operations.

Purpose

Scope

Audience

Use case overview


Introduction to EMC VPLEX In the past, users have relied on traditional physical storage to meet their information needs. Developments such as server virtualization and the growth of multiple sites throughout an enterprise or service provider’s network have placed new demands on how storage is managed and how information is accessed.

To keep pace with these new requirements, storage must evolve to deliver new methods of freeing data from a standalone physical device, as shown in Figure 1 below. Storage must be able to connect to virtual environments and still provide automation, integration with existing infrastructure, consumption on demand, security, cost efficiency, availability, and security.

Figure 1. Virtual Storage Revolution

The EMC VPLEX family is the next-generation solution for data mobility and access within, across, and between data centers. It is the first platform to deliver local and distributed federation.

Local federation provides the transparent cooperation of physical elements within a site.

Distributed federation extends access between two locations across distance.

Evolution of storage technology

VPLEX federated storage


VPLEX storage federation provides an extensive offering of new features and functionality for the era of private cloud computing utilizing EMC and non-EMC storage.

Federated AccessAnywhere™, available with VPLEX, is EMC’s breakthrough technology that enables a single copy of data to be shared, accessed, and relocated over distance.

EMC GeoSynchrony® is the VPLEX operating system.

As VPLEX removes physical barriers and enables users to access a single copy of data at different geographical locations, it also enables geographically stretched virtual or physical host clusters. This enables transparent load sharing between multiple sites, while providing the flexibility of relocating workloads between sites in anticipation of planned events (disaster avoidance). Furthermore, in case of an unplanned event that could cause disruption at one of the data centers, the failed services can be restarted at the surviving site with minimal effort, while minimizing time to recovery (disaster recovery). In the case of VPLEX Metro with the optional VPLEX Witness and Cross-Connected configuration, applications will continue to operate at the surviving site with no interruption or downtime.

VPLEX completely changes the way IT is managed and delivered—particularly when deployed with server virtualization. By enabling new models for operating and managing IT, resources can be federated—pooled and made to cooperate through the stack—with the ability to dynamically move applications and data across geographies and service providers, as shown in Figure 2. The VPLEX family breaks down technology silos and is a critical element which helps enable IT to be delivered as a service.

Figure 2. VPLEX Federated Storage

The VPLEX family consists of four products: EMC VPLEX Local, EMC VPLEX Metro, EMC VPLEX Metro Express, and EMC VPLEX Geo.

EMC VPLEX Local delivers local federation, which provides simplified management and non-disruptive data mobility across heterogeneous storage arrays within a data center. A VPLEX Local configuration is defined by up to four VPLEX engines, which are integrated into a single cluster image through their fully redundant inter-engine fabric interconnections.

A solution for one or multiple data centers


EMC VPLEX Metro delivers distributed federation, which provides data access and mobility between two VPLEX clusters within synchronous distances, having a latency of 10 ms or less between sites for this purpose. VPLEX enables you to mirror volumes within and across locations, providing continuous application availability in the event of a disaster. This capability can increase protection and availability for critical applications while making use of your existing storage resources—without requiring host resources.

EMC VPLEX Metro Express Edition is a self-contained solution in an appliance form-factor that includes the hardware, software and licenses to manage the reliable transfer and protection of up to 40 TB of local and distributed data over synchronous distance as well as up to 40 TB of RecoverPoint Continuous Data Protection.

EMC VPLEX Geo can be used to implement storage virtualization between two data centers within asynchronous distances of each other, currently defined with an approximate latency maximum of 50 ms or less.

Figure 3. VPLEX product family


Traditionally, when service providers or enterprises were tasked with the challenge of migrating data and applications between geographically-dispersed data centers, they had to go through a series of manual, error-prone tasks and activities. They would either make physical backups or use data replication services to transfer application data to the new location. Applications had to be stopped and could not be restarted until testing and verification was complete.

In today’s virtualized data centers, administrators can take advantage of VMware vMotion which enables the live migration of running virtual machines from one host to another with zero downtime, continuous service availability, and complete transaction integrity. However, migrating a virtual machine from a host in one data center to a host in another data center requires a stretched storage area network (SAN). This type of configuration requires both VMware vMotion and VMware Storage vMotion, which enables the migration of virtual machine disk files within and across storage arrays, to make the storage available at the distant site. However, this significantly adds to the time needed for failover, which limits the ability to easily move virtual machines from site to site.

EMC VPLEX, in combination with VMware and vSphere vMotion over distance, provides a unique capability that enables you to transparently move and relocate virtual machines and their corresponding applications and data over distance as shown in Figure 4, without requiring the use of Storage vMotion.

Figure 4. VM mobility between sites

VPLEX and VMware


Service provider use case: non-disruptive data migration

For nearly all customers, whether service providers or enterprises, storage platform migrations are considered an expensive, time-consuming, and risky process.

Enterprises typically pay a third party to assist in these migrations and technology refreshes, which makes the process expensive. Since the customer can’t just shut down their environments, they must work through their business units to identify outage windows to work within, usually spanning many nights and weekends. This not only lengthens the amount of time it takes to perform the migrations, it also impacts normal operations because the cycles of their engineering staff are being consumed outside of normal business hours. In many cases, the storage environment is not well documented and links to specific applications are missed, producing a risky process. After the migration window, end users can run into performance issues on the new platform but the organization can’t go back to the previous system until the next planned window, adding to the risk.

During a traditional storage array migration as shown in Figure 5, the process usually starts by purchasing and installing the new storage array. Outages are then planned over a sequence of weekends in order to migrate servers and hosts to the new storage platform. During each outage, a variety of host and array based tools are used to copy the data from the old storage platform to the new. During this process, the hosts go offline so that they can be pointed at the new storage array once it is up and operational after the data has been copied to the new location. This process of copying the data, taking the hosts offline, then re-pointing the hosts to the new location, is often referred to as the “Race to Monday” and is typically done on weekends.

Figure 5. Traditional storage migration

Traditional storage array migration and technology refresh


This is a very risky process because it is typically not reversible and the length of time that it takes is generally proportional to the number of hosts that must be migrated. This causes pain to the business because the customer is faced with the choice of keeping the applications up to support ongoing business operations or take the applications down in order to be able to take advantage of the new storage. In addition, the customer must manage two arrays during the migration process until the old array can finally be powered down.

Using EMC VPLEX for migrations offers many advantages that help customers overcome the complex challenges of traditional migrations. VPLEX can substantially reduce the service expenses related to moving to the new infrastructure. Subsequent migrations can be handled by the customer with little to no migration services costs. VPLEX also dramatically reduces the time-to-value for any new storage arrays purchased by the customer.

Instead of the lengthy process described above, the customer can implement EMC VPLEX well before it is time to perform the array migration. This transforms the event-driven migration process into simple operational maintenance which helps to remove the business objections to utilizing the new array, as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6. Migration with EMC VPLEX How does EMC VPLEX do this? With VPLEX in the environment, the new storage array arrives and is set up in a typical fashion. At that point, the customer encapsulates the storage on the new array. Because the storage is encapsulated, VPLEX can perform non-disruptive coping of the underlying storage volumes between the old and new arrays. By using VPLEX’s tunable copy process, this is done dynamically without affecting host performance. All hosts remain online during this process.

Once the copy operation is complete, the data on the new array can be made the target for the application. After the operations staff verifies the performance and availability expected from the new array, the old array can be disassociated. If the new array is not delivering as expected, the support staff can simply roll back to the old array while the hosts remain online, address the issues with the new array, and then repeat the process until everyone is satisfied with the results. We emphasize that during this entire process, the hosts remain online with no disruption or downtime.

VPLEX reduces cost, time to implement, and eliminates downtime during migration


By using EMC VPLEX for data migration events, service providers can make a very positive impact on this overall process for their customers. They can position themselves as the subject matter experts for EMC VPLEX and data migration services, and work with their customers to handle the initial migrations. This would allow the provider to capture revenue that perhaps would have gone to a third party specializing in traditional data migration projects.

In a basic engagement, the service provider could act as the lead for the migration of data from the legacy customer array to the new customer array. In this case, the provider could capture revenue from the sale of VPLEX itself, the initial configurations, and the initial migration. They could position it as a single engagement with the added benefit to the customer of more simplified migrations in the future without the need for additional migration services. In other words, once VPLEX is introduced into the customer’s environment, the customer will be able to take advantage of VPLEX for future technology refreshes and migrations without the need for the additional services from the provider. This approach may be beneficial for a customer who isn’t interested in any additional managed services or ongoing costs from the provider, but who values the assistance during the migration process.

The service provider could also use EMC VPLEX to migrate the customer data from the customer array to a shared storage array that is being used by the provider in an effort to onboard the customer to their managed-storage or cloud-based services, as shown in Figure 7. This approach would yield higher revenue returns for the service provider over time, because they would be capturing the revenue not only from the initial migration engagement, but also the ongoing revenue from the customer’s use of their managed shared-storage offerings. This would also position the provider to offer more advanced value-added services, such as managed storage, replication and disaster recovery services, public/hybrid cloud products, and continuous availability between multiple data centers.

Figure 7. Migration from a customer-managed environment to a service-provider datacenter

Positioning data migration services for service providers


In summary, EMC VPLEX gives service providers the ability to offer their customers data migration services from the customer’s legacy storage array to the provider’s shared and/or managed storage products. At the same time, they can save the customer money by reducing migration time compared to the time it would have taken using traditional migration techniques. The provider captures the revenue that otherwise might have gone to a third party data migration specialist. They enable the customer to migrate without causing downtime to their applications and end users during the migration process. And finally, the service provider lays the foundation to capture additional ongoing revenue by positioning the customer to take advantage of more high-end, higher margin, value-added services.

Data migration with VPLEX: benefits to service providers and their customers


Service provider use case: scale-out storage using mid-tier arrays

Service providers traditionally have been focused on low-end revenue models based on commodity services such as data center space and bandwidth. This is no longer the case, as they have realized the greater revenue potential and larger profit margins that come with higher-level value-added services such as managed services and cloud computing.

Today, most service providers are focused on building public, private, or hybrid cloud offerings so that they can position themselves as leaders in the eyes of their traditional customer base. With the move towards building these cloud-based services, comes significant initial infrastructure cost that providers have to absorb often before any revenue commitment has been received from their customers.

Ideally, service providers would be able to start with smaller infrastructures and then expand them as customer demand for the new cloud offerings increased. This becomes challenging because customers move to cloud-based service infrastructures expecting little to no downtime even for planned maintenance activities. In traditional models, as the infrastructure scales to accommodate rapid growth, planned outages and migration windows usually disrupt production workloads and cause downtime to customer applications.

EMC provides a solution that combines EMC VPLEX with the EMC VNX mid-tier storage platform and allows service providers to build smaller cloud environments. As demand for the services grows, they can scale up without causing downtime or service disruption to customers or workloads.

The EMC VNX unified storage platform delivers industry-leading innovation and enterprise capabilities for file, block, and object storage in a scalable, easy-to-use solution. Ideal for mixed workloads in physical or virtual environments, the VNX storage platform combines powerful and flexible hardware with advanced efficiency, management, and protection software to meet the demanding needs of today’s enterprises.

The VNX unified storage platform is designed for flash, delivering the highest performance and the lowest latency, with the cost advantage of tiering. With the Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST) technologies, the VNX delivers an unrivaled set of software that tiers data across heterogeneous drives and boosts the most active data to flash, ensuring that customers never have to make concessions for cost or performance. Highly active data is served from flash drives in cache with FAST Cache, which dynamically absorbs unpredicted spikes in system workloads. As that data ages and becomes less active over time, FAST VP (Fully Automated Storage Tiering for Virtual Pools) automatically tiers the data from high-performance to high-capacity, resulting in overall lower costs—regardless of application type or data age.

Customers around the world have come to rely on the VNX and its rich feature set because it is deeply integrated with VMware and optimized for virtual environments.

Start small and scale non-disruptively as required

Brief introduction to EMC VNX


For VMware based cloud environments, EMC VPLEX combined with EMC VNX storage simplifies the scale-out infrastructure requirement and additional availability becomes core to the overall service. VPLEX enables all of the mainstream VMware tools such as vMotion, High Availability (HA), Fault Tolerance (FT), vStorage API for Array Integrations (VAAI), vStorage API for Storage Awareness (VASA), and Distributed Resources Scheduler (DRS) to be leveraged across array boundaries so service providers can scale storage environments as needed without causing downtime for their customers. This enables more mission-critical workloads to be migrated to a service provider’s cloud infrastructure, resulting in dramatically increased revenue with higher profit margins.

To demonstrate the value that this combined solution provides, consider the example of a typical service provider data center where cloud infrastructure is deployed with more than one storage array as shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8. Cloud infrastructure deployed using multiple arrays

In this example, any activity that requires movement of data from one array to another is a challenge. Performance of the environment is difficult to load-balance and hosts typically remain very tightly coupled to the storage array with which they have been associated.

Using EMC VPLEX and VNX combined in the same VMware environment would look similar to the example in Figure 9.

EMC VNX and EMC VPLEX combined with VMware vSphere


Cloud Infrastructure Using All Arrays

Service Provider Data Center

VMware Infrastructure

Figure 9. Same environment with VPLEX storage virtualization

In this design, the hosts are associated with VPLEX so that the underlying storage can be federated and virtualized, which enables the data to become mobile. In this case, mobility means that VPLEX can move data between various VNX storage arrays without host knowledge or interruption. This permits dynamic load balancing for performance enhancement and it eliminates the maintenance windows required to relocate workloads to appropriate infrastructures as required by the tenant customer or application.

Using EMC VPLEX for data migrations, the service provider can perform storage migrations and technology refreshes as needed. Since these operations require no downtime associated with data movement, they can normally be done during business hours, causing less impact on the customer as well as the Engineering and Operations teams. This also allows the service provider to accelerate the process of adding additional storage in response to rapid customer growth, because it eliminates the traditional barriers inherent with legacy storage migration.

This revenue model demonstrates how using VPLEX with VNX5300 arrays in a scale-out implementation over time can result in earlier positive revenue recognition than using a traditional monolithic implementation where the service provider makes an initial purchase of one large array, such as an EMC VNX7500.

For this example, we will assume that Service Provider A has decided to build an initial cloud infrastructure using EMC VPLEX with an EMC VNX5300 storage array. Service Provider A started filling its sales pipelines three months before the infrastructure was in place, and it has customers ready to install as soon as it is

Revenue model: monolithic initial implementation versus scale-out


ready. Expecting success selling their cloud offerings and expecting a high growth rate, they are going to add another VNX5300 array every four months for the first eighteen months, bringing the total to five VNX5300 arrays used to support this particular environment. At that point, they are going to consider this cloud infrastructure pod at full capacity, stop implementing new customers on this infrastructure, and only capture incremental revenue from the installed customer base through the life of this cloud pod.

In comparison, Service Provider B decided to build its initial cloud infrastructure with an initial purchase of a single EMC VNX7500 storage array. This VNX7500 array will provide them with the performance and capacity equal to Service Provider A’s five VNX5300 arrays, so they need not worry about adding to the environment as customer growth expands.

Since each service provider will offer varying levels of cloud services and many different price points, predicting revenue for such an environment is challenging. For the purposes of this demonstration, we assumed that both models had the exact same amount of revenue. In month one, we started with $5000 monthly recurring revenue. Since this is a successful product with good adoption rates with the service provider’s customer base, we will assume that this monthly recurring revenue will increase by 15% month over month for the first year. We will decrease that to 10% incremental month over month revenue in the second year, and then, following month 24, we will assume a minimal 1% month over month increase due to added services from the installed customer base for the remaining cloud pod lifecycle.

It is assumed that this infrastructure is depreciated over a 60 month period, spread equally across those 60 months.

Figure 10 shows the result of this comparison demonstrating the cumulative profit of service provider B using 7500 (monolithic) and service provider A using the VNX5300 (scale-out) deployment models:

Figure 10. Earlier profit recognition using scale-out model, as opposed to monolithic model

As you can see, this demonstrates a much faster profit recognition using the scale-out model. At month 18, the two implementations represent roughly the same performance and capacity, but because of the large upfront cost using the VNX7500,

$(100,000.00)

$(50,000.00)

$-

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$100,000.00

$150,000.00

$200,000.00

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Scale-Out Model

Monolithic Model


service provider A is able to recognize profit much sooner than service provider B. Provider A also doesn’t have such a large amount of unused capacity sitting idle while they wait for customer usage to ramp up.

Obviously each service provider has different revenue models, different ramp up times for adding additional VNX arrays, and even different depreciation models. While revenue models may differ from provider to provider, similar patterns would be seen regardless of how fast or slow a service provider grew revenues. Keeping the revenue model the same for both implementations keeps all things equal except the larger upfront cost for the larger array versus the incremental costs using the scale-out model.

Service providers must also consider management and administration differences. With the scale out model, there are more pieces of the infrastructure to manage and account for during failure planning and there is a cost associated with that. However, this option gives the provider the flexibility to build out their cloud infrastructures gradually to align with customer acquisition and to do this with no disruption during the growth process.

By implementing EMC VPLEX and VNX storage at the early stages of the build process, service providers are able to keep startup costs relatively low while they build out their service offering and customer base. At the same time, they are positioning the infrastructure for rapid growth to accommodate a surge in customer acquisition while also ensuring that the process for growing the environment will be transparent to their customers, as shown in Figure 11. Overall, this allows them to offer the high service level agreements (SLAs) customers expect with cloud services and sets a foundation for simplified growth within the data center and between multiple data centers. Service provider use case: active/active workloads across data has more information.

Minimizing costs, but planning for non-disruptive growth


Public Cloud Launch

...After 6 Months Of Growth

...And Keep Growing Without Disruption

……………………………………..

……………………………………..


Figure 11. Service provider growth over time


Service provider use case: active/active workloads across data centers

Service providers are ideally positioned to offer solutions to their customers to help their businesses with disaster recovery (DR) needs. Network service providers and carriers have customers already on their networks with easy access to their own data centers which could be used for disaster recovery purposes. Cloud providers and managed service providers are already partnering with their enterprise customers to manage pieces of their infrastructure, so they can easily approach those customers about DR needs as well.

Until recently, the only viable options to address those needs revolved around data backup services and data replication to an off-premises data center. Even when secondary data centers were used as recovery sites, they were configured in traditional active/passive implementations which still meant significant downtime to bring up the production environment at the secondary site. Those solutions came with expectations of downtime and business impact if a disaster ever did occur. Depending on the service, the recovery time objective (RTO) could be days, which could mean catastrophic business loss to many organizations. Disaster recovery to a secondary site usually means that at some point, the environment must “failback” to the original production site, requiring even more downtime for the business.

When considering cloud-based infrastructures in traditional active/passive deployments, there are many limitations around primary site availability. For example, many challenges arise when implementing VMware environments between multiple arrays, or over distance between data centers. These may be challenges around workload relocation via VMware vMotion, which is traditionally only possible within the same data center, or when a workload needs to restart in a recovery data center using VMware High Availability (HA). Site failure or a major infrastructure outage results in application disruption, and failover in the event of an outage requires manual intervention, even when using disaster recovery orchestration tools such as VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), as shown in Figure 12. This has the potential to significantly impact business operations and revenue.

Figure 12. Site recovery in a VMware environment

Traditional active/passive data centers


Increasingly, more enterprises are interested in protecting their business operations from any possible event that would lead to downtime. EMC VPLEX Metro simplifies these deployment models and supports additional availability, which is critical to the overall architecture. Similar to the scale-out architecture use case described in the previous section, VPLEX Metro allows you to scale across multiple arrays. However, instead of confining the environment to a single data center, VPLEX Metro allows us to scale the environment across multiple data centers, providing a true active/active environment as shown in Figure 13.

Figure 13. Active/active data centers using VMware technologies between them

In this configuration, both data centers can be running active workloads and serving customer applications. Data from the primary data center can be immediately available and synchronized with the secondary site. EMC VPLEX and VMware combine to offer this more comprehensive solution so that businesses experience little to no downtime. Together, they provide all of the automatic benefits (non-decision based) of VMware FT, HA, and DRS, but allow them to be implemented across data centers instead of being confined within the data center walls.

VPLEX Metro uses two VPLEX clusters, one at each data center, and includes the unique capability to support synchronous distributed volumes that mirror the data between the two clusters using write-through caching. Since a VPLEX Metro distributed volume is controlled by the VPLEX cached coherency algorithms, active data I/O access to the distributed volume is possible from both data centers. This allows VPLEX Metro to provide much more than the traditional active/passive legacy replication solutions and enables truly active/active infrastructures across data centers.

VPLEX Metro distributes the same block volume to both data centers and ensures that standard HA cluster environments, like VMware HA and FT, can use this capability and can therefore be transparently deployed between the service provider data centers as well.

VPLEX brings true active/active deployments between data centers


The bottom line is that VPLEX Metro makes the host cluster believe there is no distance between the nodes so they behave just as they would in a single data center.

For this configuration to be implemented, two conditions are required. First, for VMware cloud infrastructures, there is a requirement of 10 ms or less for network latency between sites. Depending on the underlying infrastructure and what network resources the service provider has available, this generally confines deployments like this to the same metro area. However, service providers might have network infrastructures in place that allows them to support the 10 ms latency requirement at greater distances. The key is the latency, not the distance.

Next, for a service provider to take advantage of features like VMware HA and FT, Layer 2 networks must be stretched between the sites as well. Service providers have the simple option to implement network connectivity using Metro Ethernet to stretch the VLANs across the sites. Other technologies that enable stretched Layer 2 environments across transport networks are not within the scope of this document.

By using EMC VPLEX Metro and extending their cloud infrastructures across active/active data centers, service providers can position their solutions as the answer for their enterprise customers who demand extremely low or no downtime environments. They can offer higher Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for their customers because they are addressing not only the potential disaster scenarios within a local data center; they are covering an entire data center failure as well. Even in that scenario, VPLEX Metro allows them to offer continuous availability for their customer’s workloads. This capability should enable the service provider to capture additional high margin revenues from customers requiring such critical infrastructure services.

One great example of using these technologies for specific applications is the utilization of EMC VPLEX to provide Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) customers with an easy-to-deploy, active/active solution, as they transform from single to dual-site environments. EMC VPLEX Metro has passed Oracle’s rigorous testing standards and is Oracle certified in stretched cluster configurations. For more detailed information about this specific implementation, see the white paper EMC Mission-Critical Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery For Oracle Extended RAC.

Service providers can offer industry leading SLAs with active/active implementations

http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h10746-vplex-recoverpoint-oracle-dr-wp.pdf



Service provider use case: disaster recovery protection for active/active data centers using EMC VPLEX and EMC RecoverPoint

Previously in this white paper, the traditional active/passive data center model was discussed for the purposes of differentiating between that model and the active/active data center design enabled by EMC VPLEX (see Traditional active/passive data centers). The active/passive design revolves around the concept of replicating data in one data center to a second data center. At that point, the replica at the recovery site can be used to continue operations in the event of a disaster or restore the production environment after an event causing some data loss.

EMC RecoverPoint is the enabling technology for active/passive data center implementations. RecoverPoint is an out-of-band, block-level replication appliance that delivers data protection, replication, and disaster recovery using several modes of operation, as shown in Figure 14. For this paper, we will focus on the Remote Replication mode of operation which enables the replication of data between data centers.

Figure 14. EMC RecoverPoint modes of operation Replication is handled by the RecoverPoint Appliances (RPAs), which can be physical or virtual appliances. RPAs are deployed in high availability clusters with all nodes active, so that any RPA failure will not impact the replication process. RecoverPoint supports heterogeneous storage and servers, which can be deployed over asynchronous or synchronous distances. For the purpose of discussing replication for VMware cloud based environments, synchronous is defined as sites with less than 10 ms of round-trip latency between them.

RecoverPoint works by employing two key components of the solution:

The first is the write splitter, which sits in the I/O path and intercepts writes from the initiating host. It makes a copy of each write and sends one copy to the production storage, as in normal I/O operations, and then sends a copy to

Brief introduction to EMC RecoverPoint


the local RecoverPoint appliance where the data is sequenced, compressed, check-summed, and replicated to the recovery site. The data is then received by the recovery site, uncompressed, sequenced, and written to the journal volume which tracks all changes to the data. Finally, the write-order consistent data is written to the replica volume at the recovery site.

The other key component is the consistency group, which is a component also used by EMC VPLEX. In RecoverPoint terms, consistency groups allow you to group various volumes, or LUNs, either on a single system or across systems, so that those volumes are handled as a group when they are protected or recovered. In practice, a customer generally groups their applications into consistency groups (databases with database logs for example).

VPLEX GeoSynchrony 5.1 and later software adds an integrated RecoverPoint write splitter to the VPLEX cache layer. The VPLEX write splitter is designed to work with RecoverPoint 3.5 and higher. All heterogeneous storage arrays supported by VPLEX can take advantage of the data protection capabilities provided by RecoverPoint. This means that splitting can be done by VPLEX for fiber channel storage arrays from 3rd party vendors which do not possess native write splitting capability. For VPLEX, the write splitter function is carried out by the VPLEX Directors, therefore no host splitting software is required. The VPLEX write splitter supports LUNs up to 32 TB in size. Additionally, multiple RecoverPoint clusters can share the VPLEX write splitter, enabling up to six RecoverPoint clusters (with RP 4.0) to protect a single VPLEX cluster. Note that a protected LUN cannot span RecoverPoint clusters, which means that more than one RecoverPoint cluster cannot protect the same LUN.

The VPLEX GeoSynchrony 5.1 and RecoverPoint 3.5 software releases bring RecoverPoint’s best-in-class operational and disaster recovery capabilities to the VPLEX Local and VPLEX Metro products. With the VPLEX write splitter, customers are able to take full advantage of all RecoverPoint features on VPLEX virtual storage.

VPLEX virtual volumes residing on the following device types may be replicated by RecoverPoint:

Local Devices

Metro Distributed Raid-1 (synchronous cache mode)

Note that RecoverPoint can be connected to a VPLEX write splitter at only one cluster (site) of a VPLEX Metro installation. No communication is allowed between RecoverPoint and the second cluster (site) of a Metro installation. The RecoverPoint repository and journals must be local to the VPLEX site protected by RecoverPoint, and not distributed.

VPLEX virtual volumes residing on the following device types cannot be replicated by RecoverPoint:

Remote Export

Geo Distributed Raid-1 (asynchronous cache mode)

EMC VPLEX and RecoverPoint integration


VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is a disaster recovery orchestration product that helps automate many of the manual processes an administrator would need to perform during a site recovery operation. While not required when using EMC RecoverPoint to build active/passive data centers for disaster recovery purposes, SRM helps ease the burden of the administrator during a recovery process and it helps to eliminate the possibility of errors.

During an event where the recovery of a production environment is required at a site containing replicated production data, many manual steps must be performed to actually bring the recovery site operational so that business can continue. Administrators must shut down any surviving virtual machines at the production site, take steps to manage consistency groups at the recovery site, make the data read/write accessible, scan for new disks, find and register virtual machines, and then power on those virtual machines in the correct order. This manual process is cumbersome and error prone.

VMware SRM helps to automate many of these tasks by allowing the administrators to build pre-defined recovery plans which handle the recovery operation. These plans are highly customizable and allow the administrator to specify things like virtual machine start order, virtual machine dependencies, manual checks that need to be performed during certain steps, and any low priority virtual machines that can be powered down so that more resources are available for higher priority workloads. Once these recovery plans are built, the administrator simply has to activate the recovery plan through SRM when a recovery operation is needed. SRM also provides the ability to test recovery plans without impacting production or recovery environments.

The resulting overall disaster recovery solution entails two data centers, each with its own vCenter instance, SRM, hosts, network, and storage. EMC RecoverPoint handles the data replication between the sites. VMware Site Recovery Manager handles the orchestration of the recovery process, should that need to be initiated.

For more detailed information about EMC RecoverPoint and VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM), including how Service Providers can leverage them to build a multi-tenant Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solution, refer to the white paper EMC Disaster Recovery As A Service Solution.

For this last use case, the benefits of the active/active data centers enabled by EMC VPLEX will be combined with EMC RecoverPoint site-to-site data replication to provide a highly available, disaster recovery enabled solution that can’t be matched in the industry. This solution would be deployed by service providers who serve customers requiring mission critical infrastructures with zero tolerance for downtime or data loss.

To provide the maximum amount of uptime with zero data loss, a Service Provider could deploy a two-site active/active data center implementation within a single metro area. They could then implement a more traditional disaster recovery solution using EMC RecoverPoint with VMware Site Recovery Manager and have data from one of the VPLEX sites replicated to a third site outside of the geographical area (the recovery site), so that recovery could be performed if the entire VPLEX cluster were to fail. Figure 15 shows this example.

Using VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) with RecoverPoint

Disaster recovery enabled active/active data centers

http://www.emc.com/collateral/white-papers/h12031-wp-disaster-recovery-as-a-service.pdf



Metro Data Center 1


Metro Data Center 2

vMotion, DRS, HA, FT

Recovery Data Center


VMware Site Recovery Manager

RecoverPoint CRR

VPLEX Metro

Figure 15. A three site configuration utilizing active/active data centers and a third site for recovery

In configurations that combine EMC VPLEX Metro with EMC RecoverPoint CRR, I/O is written to both VPLEX clusters during normal VPLEX operations. Data is then split on one VPLEX cluster to the replica volumes located both at the cluster and at the remote recovery site. The RPA clusters are deployed at one VPLEX Metro site and at the recovery site.

Although the RecoverPoint splitter is resident on both VPLEX clusters, only one cluster in a VPLEX Metro configuration can have RPAs deployed. This configuration supports unlimited points in time, with granularity up to a single write, for local and distributed VPLEX virtual volumes. This would allow the service provider to recover customer environments from disasters by quickly and easily returning to any point-in-time copy on the VPLEX cluster where the RPAs are deployed or at the recovery site.

This implementation allows the service provider to offer all of the continuous availability benefits of using the active/active data center model in addition to the safety of an active/passive disaster recovery solution. It enables the service provider to target a wider customer base and provide service to those enterprises who demand the most critical uptimes and guarantees in the industry.


Summary: Using EMC VPLEX in service provider and cloud provider environments

As you can see from the various use cases discussed in this white paper, VPLEX can fit into almost any service-provider or cloud-provider environment and serves a wide variety of needs. Specifically, the following use cases were covered:

VPLEX can help with storage array migrations and technology refreshes by enabling providers to non-disruptively move data from legacy storage arrays to new arrays.

VPLEX can allow a provider to build initial cloud environments using smaller and cheaper VNX storage arrays, and then scale the environment out over time as customer growth demands. This helps to keep initial costs low and enables the provider to recognize profit much sooner.

VPLEX enables active/active data center deployments where the full capabilities of VMware vSphere (vMotion, HA, DRS) can be utilized between data centers.

Combined with EMC RecoverPoint, VPLEX can allow a provider to build a two site active/active environment protected by a third data center serving as a recovery site. This enables the provider to aggressively pursue those customers who require the highest levels of uptime and data protection.

From the basic use cases to the more advanced deployment models, this single platform can help address all of the needs that exist in most service provider environments.

VPLEX: a fit for any provider


References

For more information, see the following white papers:

Using VMware vSphere with EMC VPLEX: Best Practices Planning

Improving VMware Disaster Recovery with EMC RecoverPoint

EMC Mission-Critical Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery For Oracle Extended RAC

EMC Disaster Recovery As A Service Solution

White papers

http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h7118-using-vmware-virtualization-platforms-vplex.pdf

http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/white-papers/h2352-recoverpoint-improving-vmware-dstr-rcvry-wp.pdf




h11926: using emc vplex in service-provider and cloud-provider

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