Diskxtender with Centera

Hi,

Is anyone using Diskxtender with Centera storage and multi-target media groups? For resilience we'd like to use this setup to write simultaneously to 2 Centeras, but we are wondering how well this works.

Thanks,
Sheppie

Responses(4)

fschlupp

397 Posts

0

January 9th, 2007 17:00

You can use multi-target media groups to write to two Centeras however you may get better performance using Centera's replication feature. To use multi-target you essentially create two EMC Centera Media Services using the DX admin. Use node name aliases as opposed to the Centera's ip addresses in case you have to make a change. You'd then create a multi-target media group and two Centera media groups. Configure automation on the Centera groups and add to the multi-target group. Don't forget move rules. I'd advise you to use the latest release (6.1). If the Centera hosting the primary virtual media fails DX should retrieve the file from the secondary media on the other Centera.

Having said that unless you are using clustered servers to host DiskXtender you still have a single point of failure. Another approach would be to use Replistor to replicate files between two DX servers each independently writing files out to the Centeras.

xvan_egmond

74 Posts

1

December 24th, 2006 02:00

Sheppie,

are you sure you want to use centera? We have a setup with comvault migrator and the performance of the centera is really terrible. Although it is connected to a 2Gbit highway, the write and read performance is at about 2MB/s and this seems to be what is expected of the centera in this case.\
Centera is meant for archiving data not to be accessed regularly not as a third tier of storage. Perhaps you could better use a celerra of clariion with 500GB sata for that.

However in answer to your question, we do not use diskxtender but comvault. We use a second media-agent (say storagenode) for use with the remote data and data is copied through the comserver to this other media-agentcomcell. If one site fails, we just need to start comserver on the other agent. This would not work with networker, but maybe it will with diskxtender, I do not have any knowledge of that....

Hope it helps.

sheppie

108 Posts

0

January 4th, 2007 02:00

Thanks Xander.

I realise that the Centera is an archiving solution and that is the way we would be using it. I was just interesting in getting more info about using diskxtender with multi-target media groups as opposed to using centera replication.

I'm unable to find any information on which of this methods is better for ensuring resilience across 2 Centeras.

Regards,
Sheppie

sheppie

108 Posts

0

January 17th, 2007 09:00

Thanks Frank - I think that answers my question.

We are using Centera replication but since it is asynchronous there is always the chance of data loss if the primary Centera is lost before it has had a chance to replicate to the secondary.

I thought multi-target media groups might get around this limitation by writing to both Centeras simultaneously. If one Centera went down the data would still be available from the other.

Regards,
Sheppie

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